Stretching Lessons: The Daring that Starts from Within

Like the delicate finger exercises that help pianists achieve great sonatas, Stretching Lessons reads like a series of contemplative exercises that help readers achieve great wisdom. Writing with utter humility and humanity, Sue Bender shares the private (and sometimes painful) life lessons that have helped her stretch into a bigger person. We read of Bender as a sixth-grade girl who didn't get chosen for the accelerated progress class, and how her body helped her find a face-saving solution. Sometimes her confessions are downright comforting, particularly since this author of Plain and Simple and Everyday Sacred lets us know that she still struggles with creating too much struggle:

I am wiser.

And I am still struggling...

I'm sixty-six years old and I want to learn about ease.

Consider this an in-and-out book, one that can be opened to any page, where readers will find brief one-to-three-page essays about stretching into one's biggest self, biggest dream, biggest life. Although it's billed as a memoir, don't expect a tightly woven literary narrative. Even so, the airy format with plenty of white space manages to convey a strong sense of Bender's life and the common ground we all find in her experiences. --Gail Hudson

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• Plain and Simple: A Woman's Journey to the Amish
• Everyday Sacred: A Woman's Journey Home
• Plain and Simple: A Woman's Journey to the Amish
• The Abundance of Less: Lessons in Simple Living from Rural Japan
• Centering in Pottery, Poetry, and the Person
• Outer Order, Inner Calm: Declutter and Organize to Make More Room for Happiness
• Unsheltered: A Novel
• The Great Spring: Writing, Zen, and This Zigzag Life