Water, Snow, Water: Constructive Living for Mental Health

“You can’t be happy all the time. You can’t feel comfortable all the time. You can’t have the feelings you want when you want them for as long as you want them. Life just doesn’t operate like that. Maybe you have tried counseling or therapy or diets or meditation or chemicals or some sort of esoteric magic to work on your feelings, to fix your life or make it perfect. Nothing worked as well as you had hoped. Reading this book won’t solve your life problems either. But it will give you some suggestions that are sensible, practical and doable—suggestions about how to work on your life. Work is the key word here. Sitting and talking with someone is not enough. Venting your feelings is not enough. Putting your mind in some quiet inner place is not enough. Working on your life involves moving your body, doing your life purposefully and constructively. This book offers you concrete assignments for such activity.”

Adapting ideas from Japanese psychotherapies and Eastern thought, Constructive Living (CL) offers a sensible way of living. Across cultures and generations, CL ideas make sound, practical sense. Water, Snow, Water presents the current state of CL in its application to the West. Using a variety of materials—including essays, tales, maxims, detailed behavioral advice, case studies—David Reynolds, the founder of CL, presents fresh perspectives on everything from worrying to love, from psychotherapy to death.

• David K. Reynolds, Author

  David K. Reynolds is recognized as the leading Western authority on Japanese psychotherapies. He is a former faculty member of the UCLA School of Public Health, the USC School of Medicine, and the University of Houston. His books have been published by university presses (California, Chicago, Hawaii, and New York) and popular presses in the U.S., Japan, China, Europe, Australia, and elsewhere. In 1988 the World Health Organization sent Dr. Reynolds to China to train psychiatrists there in Constructive Living. He currently lectures and conducts workshops around the Pacific, including approximately three months in spring and three months in fall in Japan lecturing and consulting in Japanese. He is the only non-Japanese to receive the Kora Prize and the Morita Prize by the Morita Therapy Association of Japan.