NANCY G. SHAPIRO
ON THE ROAD TO CALM
The Book of Calm
by Nancy G. Shapiro
2017 SILVER AWARD WINNER — NAUTILUS BOOK AWARDS
2018 SILVER AWARD WINNER — LIVING NOW BOOK AWARDS
2022 WINNER DA VINCI EYE AWARD & 2022 FINALIST —
ERIC HOFFER BOOK AWARDS
“I used to have a turbulent brain.”
With this sentence, Nancy G. Shapiro takes your hand and leads you on a story-filled adventure to Calm. In this constantly changing world where events and situations can suddenly shift the course of our lives, Nancy celebrates story as a guide to a clearer, more compassionate, and wiser way of being.
With your walking stick and generous attention ready, follow her roadmap to the dynamic composure within yourself and transform reaction into clarity, blame into compassion, and confusion into choice. Then watch Calm ripple out into the world: one person, one family, one community at a time.
It is easy to feel stuck, anxious, and confused when old stories influenced by family, peers, and culture define our thoughts and actions.
With Nancy as your advocate, choosing to step away from such uneasiness and onto the road of calm leads to actively reimagining the stories of your life.
Old restraints now gone, you are free to listen to, claim, and act upon your particular knowing and wisdom. This dynamic self-awareness, filled with curiosity and a reawakened commitment to yourself opens up your world, an opening that brims over with strengths and talents you can now nurture, refine, and share.
Open Up Your World to Calm
COMMUNION
There is a bowl.
Stories gather within its unsounded depths
even as the bowl sits in the curve of your palm
tales once pebble-sized now grown into stones,
the sly ones that enter without your knowing.
There is a bowl
filled with the water of compassion.
This is the same bowl.
It brims over crying
when the stories jostle against one another.
In its brimming the bowl asks only this —
Make room.
Make space between the words where
consequence and compassion may sit in communion.
Everything rests on the holding of the bowl.
— Nancy G. Shapiro
from The Book of Calm
​