Creative Stress

• While negative stress can spin between suppression and explosion, creative stress engages directly and articulates boldly.
• While negative stress swings between passivity and volatility, creative stress modulates the tension and channels energy into fruitful action
• While negative stress victimizes others or perpetuates a state of victimhood, creative stress takes responsibility, avoids scapegoating and seeks to heal and to restore strength.
• While negative stress is punitive and demands vindication, creative stress seeks to resolve conflict, and cultivate qualities of forgiveness and compassion.
• While negative stress feeds off inadequacy, or an inflated sense of worth, creative stress transcends the ego’s false reality and dives into soul power.

Discover how to work with stress as a catalyst, Marianne Williamson calls Creative Stress the “medicine for our time” and Jean Houston praises its “wildly original” approach to how we dance with the universal energy of stress.

It is a well-known truism that it takes a deep commitment to change; it takes an even deeper commitment to grow. In this brilliant and evocative book, the author makes the stunning if surprising case for creative stress as a major force behind growth and transformation. As readers we experience a mythic turnabout as we are lured into a state of being larger than our sorrows and more complex and satisfying than all our dreams. Truly, a wildly original and critically important work for our time and the unique challenges we face. --- Jean Houston, Author, A Mythic Life

James O'Dea has a uniquely kind and peaceful presence, and now he shares how we can find that for ourselves. This book delivers the medicine for our times. --- Marianne Williamson, Author, A Return to Love and The Age of Miracles

Every word of James O’Dea’s fabulous exploration into creative stress is an opening to our maturation and indeed fulfillment as a species. His book touched the very essence of my being; he radiates his presence, a loving and profound friend who really knows what he is talking about because he has been there! I felt him with us...warm and wise, intimately encouraging, challenging and illuminating our lives. He is a companion who guides us through the most difficult challenges as the actual energy to help us realize our ever emergent potential as cocreative humans. A great gift. --- Barbara Marx Hubbard, Founder, Foundation for Conscious Evolution and Author, Conscious Evolution: Awakening the Power of our Social Potential

James O'Dea makes a major contribution: Creative Stress covers the ground everyone should "get" right away.--- Rustum Roy, Author, Scholar, Visiting Professor of Medicine, University of Arizona; Founder & Chair, Friends of Health