Streams of Contentment: Lessons I Learned on My Uncle’s Farm

By Robert J. Wicks

With over 200,000 books sold, Robert J. Wicks, the bestselling author of Riding the Dragon, applies lessons learned as a city boy spending summers on his family's farm to the complex and hectic reality of contemporary life.
For the first time, author, speaker, psychologist, and spiritual guide Robert J. Wicks opens a window into his personal life, relating stories of the people and places that have shaped his spiritual perspective in youth and early in his professional career. Streams of Contentment takes as its focus Wicks's experiences as a New York City boy spending summers on his uncle's farm in the Catskills. He highlights the resonance between life in the country and the insights of spiritual writers on gratefulness and mindfulness, concluding: "The crucial calling for me now is to be content with who and where I already am."

With characteristic charm and insight, Wicks offers a simple prescription for finding contentment: have low expectations and high hopes, recognize that a little silence and solitude is no small thing, and discover the surprising power of humility. He also includes thirty brief reflections and simple practices for discovering contentment. In fifteen poignant, sometimes humorous, and always instructive lessons, Wicks builds on the insights first developed in Riding the Dragon to demonstrate how contentment is found through simplicity, gratitude, and compassion.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sorin Books
• Release date: Oct 3, 2011
• ISBN: 9781933495460

Robert J. Wicks

Psychologist and popular speaker Robert J. Wicks is the author of more than sixty books for individuals and professionals, including the bestselling Riding the Dragon. He speaks internationally about resilience, self-care, and the prevention of secondary stress to audiences from the US Congress to Walter Reed Army Hospital, from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine to Harvard Children’s Hospital, and from the Princeton Theological Seminary to the NATO Intelligence Fusion Center in England. Some of Wicks’s presentations include speaking at the commemoration of the Boston Marathon Bombing at the Boston Public Library; a keynote for the American Medical Directors Association; a course in Beirut, Lebanon, for relief workers from Aleppo, Syria; and the psychological debriefing of relief workers evacuated from Rwanda during the genocide in 1994. He also regularly speaks at the Los Angeles Religious Education Congress. Wicks serves as a professor emeritus at Loyola University Maryland, and has taught in universities and professional schools of psychology, medicine, nursing, theology, education, and social work. He earned a doctorate in psychology from Hahnemann Medical College and Hospital and has received honorary degrees from Georgian Court, Caldwell, and Marywood universities. In 1996, Pope John Paul II awarded Wicks a papal medal for his service to the Catholic Church. He also received the first Alumni Award for Excellence in Professional Psychology from Widener University and the Humanitarian of the Year Award from the American Counseling Association’s Division on Spirituality, Ethics and Religious Values in Counseling.