Image at right: At Mission Wolf in Southern Colorado, the breathtaking Sangre de Cristo mountain range are your backdrop to adventure

By Lynn Braz

By Amelia Glynn

When Will Keepin, PhD, author and president of the Satyana Institute, a non-profit service and training organization, invited the audience to stand and participate in a group exercise, I felt myself gripped by a familiar panic.

Can we train ourselves to be happy?

February's here, which means the Valentine's-Day-industrial-complex has shifted into high gear. Not that chocolates and heart-shaped sentiments are evil, but if you're seeking a deeper love and stronger relationships that don't involve trips to Venus or Mars, these six books are a good start.

Classic

In How to Expand Love: Widening the Circle of Loving Relationships, His Holiness the Dalai Lama names seven steps you can take towards the experience of limitless love in all human relationships-not just romantic ones. All love, he says, begins and ends with the self. (A true "classic" from the Tibetan spiritual leader would be The Art of Happiness: A Handbook for Living, but both books offer the core lessons of Buddhism.)

To honor 9/11 this year, I promised to do a small, but good deed: I've pledged to sort cans at a local food bank.

Before the likes of Bridget Jones and Carrie Bradshaw there was Karen Salmansohn. As a successful author, motivational coach, and LIME radio personality, Salmansohn has taught women "How to Succeed In Business Without a Penis" and "How to Make Your Man Behave in 21 Days or Less Using the Secrets of Professional Dog Trainers." Self-described as a creator of "self-help books for lazy people and those who wouldn't be caught dead with a self-help book," Salmansohn's latest venture is "Gut: How to Think From Your Middle to Get to the Top," (September 2006, HOW Publishing). What, you ask, makes Salmansohn so qualified to teach you to trust your intuition?

The over 50,000 life coaches in practice worldwide will tell you that money can, in fact, buy happiness—or at least balance in your life—if you're willing to do the work. Critics see them as unqualified, amateur psychotherapists, who might do more harm than good. While there are training programs for coaches, it is an unregulated industry and most coaches are not certified. Can life coaches really deliver what they promise?