Unlocking the Heart

Learn how to bring more self-care and creativity into your life with personal insights about the writing process, inspiring prompts, poems, and daily devotionals from award-winning poet James Crews.

Writing can be cathartic. It can be healing. And you do not have to be a writer to benefit from the healing and meditative effects of writing. Likewise, you do not have to be a meditator to experience the life-changing power of mindfulness and self-compassion. But sometimes, writing can be frustrating, when you can’t seem to find the way to express your feelings on paper, so that the healing can begin.

Unlocking the Heart: Writing for Mindfulness, Courage, and Self-Compassion is a book for those seeking to bring more self-care and creativity into their routines. Award-winning poet and author James Crews shares his poems with subjects ranging from vulnerability and grief to courage and gratitude. But more than just a poetry anthology, each poem is accompanied by James’s personal insight into his inspiration and state of mind when writing his poetry, as well as writing prompts to help inspire you to get started on your writing journey. It is the perfect book for anyone who is interested in the poetic work of others or is inspired to try any kind of writing for themselves. Whether or not you want to write your own poetry, this deeply moving, and ultimately inspiring, practice in mindfulness can help bring self-compassion, courage, and creativity into your daily life.

Award-winning author: James Crews is the recipient of the Prairie Schooner Prize and Cowles Prize. His writing has been featured in The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, Ploughshares, and Sun Magazine.

The perfect companion: Unlocking the Heart is the perfect companion to Kindness Will Save the World and How to Love the World, as well as the rest of James Crews’ growing bibliography.

Foreword by bestselling poet and philosopher: Mark Nepo, author of the New York Times #1 bestseller The Book of Awakening, pens a thoughtful and insightful foreword to Crews’ work.