A recently released book of essays holds a big promise in its title: Healing The Heart of The World: Harnessing the Power of Intention to Change Your Life and Your Planet. Not a bad way to start the new year. Though many of the usual spiritual suspects are contributors––intuitive Caroline Myss, Dean Ornish the holistic cardiologist, genderologist John Gray––there are some heavier hitters including Andrew Harvey, Thich Nhat Hanh, and Prince Charles.

Healing the Heart of the World seems to be tapping into a new trend in self-help lit––serving others while you help yourself. Often accused of promoting indulgent navel-gazing, the genre seems to be galvanizing to apply a how-to balm to the world, merging activism and spiritual psychology. The current What the Bleep craze is about healing ourselves so we can better know our interconnectedness; Eckhart Tolle’s recent follow-up to The Power of Now, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose reaches through and beyond the self for a broader transformation; and the main tenet of another popular new book by Buddhist teacher Sakyong Mipham, Ruling Your World: Ancient Strategies For Modern Life, is “If you just stop thinking about yourself all the time, happiness and confidence will come naturally.”

It’s not clear to me if the latter sentiment is the real trajectory of this apparent directional shift: Help others so you can help yourself. But it looks more like a compounding of concerns––the thinking may go: The planet and our souls are in jeopardy and, being holistic thinkers, we can no longer consider them separately.

To this end, Dean Ornish’s essay in the book is about love and healing––he puts a New Age cliché in simple, clear terms: “Love promotes survival. Both nurturing and being nurtured are life-affirming.” He goes on to emphasize the importance of community in generating sustaining love––getting beyond the self and truly connecting. Following up with another successful cliché made fresh, he quotes Rumi, who may be the crystal ball for this healing-is-all-one phenomenon:There is a community of the spirit. /Join it, and feel the delight/of walking in the noisy street…/Why do you stay in prison/when the door is so wide open? /Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking… /Flow down and down in always/widening rings of being.