Into The Magic Shop

Description

The award-winning New York Times bestseller about the extraordinary things that can happen when we harness the power of both the brain and the heart Growing up in the high desert of California, Jim Doty was poor, with an alcoholic father and a mother chronically depressed and paralyzed by a stroke. Today he is the director of the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE) at Stanford University, of which the Dalai Lama is a founding benefactor. But back then his life was at a dead end until at twelve he wandered into a magic shop looking for a plastic thumb. Instead he met Ruth, a woman who taught him a series of exercises to ease his own suffering and manifest his greatest desires. Her final mandate was that he keep his heart open and teach these techniques to others. She gave him his first glimpse of the unique relationship between the brain and the heart. Doty would go on to put Ruth’s practices to work with extraordinary results—power and wealth that he could only imagine as a twelve-year-old, riding his orange Sting-Ray bike. But he neglects Ruth’s most important lesson, to keep his heart open, with disastrous results—until he has the opportunity to make a spectacular charitable contribution that will virtually ruin him. Part memoir, part science, part inspiration, and part practical instruction, Into the Magic Shop shows us how we can fundamentally change our lives by first changing our brains and our hearts.

About the Author

Dr James R Doty is a Clinical Professor in the Department of Neurosurgery at Stanford University, and the Director of the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education, which he cofounded with the Dalai Lama. As the Director of CCARE, he has spearheaded many research projects on compassion and altruism, and their relationship to the brain. He is also an inventor and philanthropist, sitting on the board of a number of charities, including Friends of New Orleans (FONO) and the Dalai Lama Foundation of which he is Chairman.

He is the author of the New York Times and international bestseller of Into the Magic Shop (Yellow Kite, 2016), which has now been translated into 40 languages and is the basis for the album, Love Yourself: Tear by K-pop sensation BTS.