“You are making yourself miserable, and you are the only one who can stop it.”

Rachael Kable, “The Mindful Kind”

Rachael Kable, author of “The Mindful Kind” and host of “The Mindful Kind” podcast, may be young, but she is wise.

The host of the No. 1 mindfulness podcast, she has written an excellent guidebook for anyone interested in mindfulness. You’ll refer to it again and again. I’m planning to keep a copy on my Kindle app on the my phone.

For example, she suggests a new habit: Use the feeling of stress as a signal to do a mindfulness exercise.

Rachael is an Australian who sounds and looks fairly young. Sometimes her examples from her own life reflect a limited … so far … life experience. But she does have many wonderful options for introducing awareness and intention in many aspects of life, both in the book and the podcast. At the book’s conclusion, she suggests doing one new activity in the book a week to eventually build a great repertoire of responses to keep it on task.

Rachael never discusses religion. Her ideas are suitable for any Christian to try. Subscribe to the podcast and buy the book. You’ll be glad you did.

Carol A. Berry’s book, “Learning from Henri Nouwen and Vincent van Gogh: A Portrait of the Compassionate Life,” stems from Berry taking classes with the Dutch theologian Nouwen at Yale Divinity School. Nouwen focused on the spiritual life of the van Gogh in his course on compassion, and Berry has continued that study since 1979.

I thought I knew a lot about Van Gogh, but I had no idea that he was a minister and missionary before he was an artist. He immersed himself with the poorest of the poor to the point that many, including his parents, thought he was becoming insane.

And indeed that may have been true. The one issue I have with this book is its tendency to gloss over van Gogh’s mental illness. As an advocate for people with mental illness, I find this inappropriate. People with mental illness are some of the most compassionate people that I have ever met.

Nonetheless, people who love Nouwen’s work and people who love van Gogh’s work both should read this book for the insights it provides. Another big aha for me from the art side of the equation: Impressionism in Europe really developed from Japan opening itself to the world in the mid-1800s so Europeans saw its artwork for the first time.

It’s a quick read, well illustrated with pictures of van Gogh’s work as he became an artist after his experiences as a missionary to the poor.