Mr. Kaufman and the Option Institute have been featured in over 2,000 major media articles and programs, including The New York Times, People magazine, Reader’s Digest, Good Morning America, and interviews with Oprah Winfrey. Over 200 universities have placed his books on reading lists for courses in departments such as Philosophy, Psychology, and Education.
Additionally, Mr. Kaufman leads workshops, conducts seminars and presents motivational talks worldwide. He and his wife recieved the Humanitas Prize for their screenplay of the NBC movie, Son-Rise: The Miracle of Love, after helping their once-autistic son emerge from the “incurable” illness of autism. He is also the two-time recipient of the Christopher Award for his writing.
- Happiness Is A Choice (Best Seller)
- Son-Rise: The Miracle Continues (Best Seller)
- PowerDialogues
- No Regrets
- To Love Is To Be Happy With
- Giant Steps
- A Miracle To Believe In
- A Sacred Dying
- Future Sight
- Outsmarting Your Karma
Happiness Is A Choice
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Happiness Is A Choice represents the cutting edge of Barry Neil Kaufman’s evolving teaching, focusing on empowering our moment of change, the moment in which we can make self-acceptance, inner peace, joy, and love immediately tangible with these easy-to-use tools. Bears (Barry) Neil Kaufman offers a gentle, yet powerful, way to jump through a lengthy “process” of change right into action.
This book takes us step-by-step on a journey to increase personal power, sharing the same techniques that participants use at the Option Institute. In his work over the years, Bears has observed that people who are most successful in finding happiness share certain traits. In this Book he has used these traits to create six Shortcuts To Happiness that you can begin using immediately.
Happiness Is A Choice is filled with moving and inspiring examples of people taking roadways you too could follow – mapped by those who have chosen happiness, peace of mind, and love as a way of life. Many of these people used the tools presented in this book to heal troubled relationships, to revitalize stagnant careers, to deal with sickness or stress, or to infuse new vigor into their lives.
This book will change your life. A book to cherish and to share…a book that will ignite the healing process.
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We are all players in the game of life…and this book shows how to be a winner. Barry Neil Kaufman’s champions making the choice to believe in ourselves, to have a positive attitude, to be hopeful and to seize the power of loving ourselves and others.
Lou Holtz
Head Football Coach, University of Notre Dame
Barry Neil Kaufman has written a moving exploration of the healing power of compassion and caring. Happiness Is A Choice affirms the unlimited potential of the human spirit and offers hope to those who have been challenged by adversity.
Coretta Scott King
CEO of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change
Within these pages Kaufman unfolds a precious secret for attaining happiness and leading a more meaningful, joyful life…A wonderfully wise, warm and insightful book that is sure to reward those who read it with a richer, more balanced life.
Jesse Stoff, M.D.
Author of The Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
Son-Rise: The Miracle Continues
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In 1979, the classic best-seller Son-Rise was made into an award-winning NBC television special, which has been viewed by 300 million people worldwide. Now, Son-Rise: The Miracle Continues presents not only the expanded and updated journal of Barry and Samahria Kaufman’s successful effort to reach their “unreachable” autistic child, but goes beyond to include a sensitive portrayal of how that singular event has become a world-wide phenomenon.
Part one of Son-Rise: The Miracle Continues is the astonishing and poignant record of Raun Kaufman’s development from a lifeless, non-communicative child into an active, loving, and verbal boy. When he was a year old, Raun began to withdraw from human contact. Oblivious to his surroundings, he appeared deaf and blind, staring silently for hours, examining his fingers, and rocking endlessly.
The experts offered little hope and as the Kaufmans watched their son slipping further and further into his impenetrable shell, they sensed time was critical. They decided to act on their own – crossing a bridge into uncharted territory in what became the adventure of their lives. When the Kaufmans completed their program based on love and total acceptance, their son showed no traces of his former condition.
Part two tells of Raun’s development after age four. His accomplishments surprise us and teach us much about love and limitless possibilities.
Part three delivers deeply moving accounts of five other ordinary families who become extraordinary when they refuse to be daunted, refuse to stop loving, and, guided by the Kaufmans, use The Son-Rise Program® to reach their own “unreachable” children.
Son-Rise: The Miracle Continues is an awe-inspiring reminder that love made tangible can move mountains.
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Once in a century a story of such daring and devotion sparks the human spirit. No words could describe my awe while reading Son-Rise: The Miracle Continues. The Kaufmans’ astounding success in curing their son and helping other families to do the same will inspire us all. If there were a Nobel Prize for Love, I’d want the Kaufmans to be first to receive one.
Dr. Wayne Dyer
Author, Your Erroneous Zones
An inspiring and hopeful book. To see this hopeless youngster gradually respond to the Kaufmans’ total investment of themselves is awe-inspiring. The book is beautifully written. I found it so fascinating I devoured it all in one evening. It is quite a contribution.
Dr. Carl Rogers
Renowned Psychologist
The Kaufmans’ work is inspiring, ground-breaking and visionary. It is the science of love, compassion and insight that will transform the world
Deepak Chopra
Author, The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success
Power Dialogues: The Ultimate System for Personal Change
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Power Dialogues: The Ultimate System for Personal ChangePowerDialogues is the most readable, useful, and comprehensive guidebook to date on the Option Process® Dialogue. As a landmark book for thousands of people around the world, it offers a unique, simple, and effective tool for personal growth. It is now being used, as well, by helping professionals as a cutting-edge adjunct to many educational, therapeutic, and spiritual traditions. Additionally, the Option Institute® International Learning & Training Center uses PowerDialogues℠ as the primary text in its Certification Programs.
This book is a must-read for those who want to learn how to take charge of their own destiny and master a sense of self-trust, inner ease, and clarity that is built on a platform of respect, dignity, and love.
PowerDialogues takes a quantum leap forward in providing mastery in the Option Process Dialogue, a Socratic form of inquiry using a logical system of questions. It represents a phenomenal breakthrough in the manner and speed with which Mentor/Counselors learn and train.
For professionals wanting to integrate this process into their existing practices, PowerDialogues gives them a working understanding of, and skill in using, the Option Process Dialogue with clients, patients, and all those they assist.
For those interested in the Option Process Dialogue for personal exploration and development, PowerDialogues provides a life-changing system that can be applied to make meaningful and lasting personal changes.
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I have been a psychiatrist for thirty years. Never before has any process taught me so much about how to be with others. The Option Process® is clear, precise and packs a punch. At the center of this process are the principles of being present, being loving, accepting others and being non-directive. To have been given tools in PowerDialogues to follow these principles is a great gift indeed. I am grateful.
Ted McCarthy, M.D.
Chief of Psychiatry, Mercy Hospital, Maine
PowerDialogues has profoundly transformed the way I work as psychiatrist. Using the Option Process® Dialogue, I have seen people change rapidly and painlessly, without the need for years of therapy. I am deeply grateful to Mr. Kaufman for making this powerful and effective method available to everyone!
Philip N. Lomas, M.D.
Psychiatrist, Wisconsin
For over ten years, I have been in the business of helping diverse people work together to solve complex issues. I found one of the most powerful techniques to use in erasing barriers between people: Barry Neil Kaufman’s PowerDialogues. At a time of crisis in my own life, I learned the Option Process Dialogue. Not only did it help me to transform myself, but I also now teach it in my own work. As a result, the groups that I work with are more productive, more successful than ever before, and serve as role models within their organizations! This process has been critical to their success!
Michael Rubell
President and Senior Consultant, TeamWorks International, New Jersey
No Regrets
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Winner of the Independent Publisher Book Award. No Regrets is an intimate memoir of an extraordinary reconciliation between a father and son. This remarkable true story explores the fear that can rip families to shreds, as well as the courage and love that can bring them back together exemplifying the Option Process® in action.
Kaufman and his father had a rift between them the size of the Great Divide. Kaufman’s father, Abe, considered him the black sheep of the family and rejected his son’s philosophy and teachings. When Abe called saying he had twenty-seven malignant tumors in his abdomen and groin, Kaufman responded with excitement, “Sounds like you’re about to have one of the great adventures of your life, Pop!” There was silence at the other end of the phone, until he heard his dad say to his mom, “See? That’s why we called him. Listen to what he just said!”
Barry Neil Kaufman’s response typifies his attitudinal perspective. An outrageous, “out-of-the-box” optimist, he helped his father live more fully in his final two years of life than Abe had in his previous eighty-three years. It’s the same attitudinal perspective Kaufman had used to help his own son recover from autism, nearly twenty-five years earlier.
The life-affirming principles that are woven throughout No Regrets have been taught to thousands of people at the Option Institute® since it was founded by Barry Neil Kaufman in 1983.
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The search for peace in the world must start within the human heart and within our own families. Barry Neil Kaufman understands that. By personal example and through his writing and counseling, he gives a compelling vision for the building of inner and outer peace.
President Jimmy Carter
Nobel Peace Prize Laureate
Barry Neil Kaufman is a gift to our world and his writings are among our treasures. Now once more the human community is blessed, this time by the extraordinary book, No Regrets. Thank you, Barry, for showing us again how grace and love can become part of our everyday experience.
Neale Donald Walsch
Author, Conversations With God and The New Revelation
No Regrets is quite wonderful. A book of deep healing. The work of a true heart, of deep courage and unfailing devotion. Certainly required reading for all who wish to complete unfinished business and decompose the armoring over the heart to meet the world in mercy and forgiveness.
Stephen and Ondrea Levine
Authors, Who Dies and A Year To Live
To Love Is To Be Happy With
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To Love Is To Be Happy WithThis best-selling book, which details the principles and applications of the Option Process®, has become an indispensable personal manual for hundreds of thousands of people who want a more loving and life-affirming basis by which to guide their lives. It has also become a teaching text, along with Son-Rise: The Miracle Continues and A Miracle to Believe In, in over 250 universities.
The Option Process is a very simple, beautiful, accepting, and non-judgmental dialogue method and attitude. Through the fascinating and intimate stories of the author and those with whom he shares the Option Philosophy™, we read the awe-inspiring stories of people who come to trust themselves and experience themselves as their own best experts.
In each chapter, Barry Neil Kaufman shows us how to apply those very same principles in our everyday lives …dealing frankly with love relationships, guilt, self-trust, children, questions of health, sex, and money.
The Option Process, based on the attitude that to love is to be happy with, is an extraordinary way to discard self-defeating beliefs and to clarify doubts that have for years inhibited our personal and professional success.
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Hurrah for the Option Process book. Brilliant, awesome, yet amazingly readable. It shares a vision and method from which you will emerge irrevocably changed — happier, clearer, more in touch with what you want.
Dr. Wayne W. Dyer
Author, I Can See Clearly Now
I feel I know both you and your wife through your wonderful books and tapes. I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed them and followed with amazement and joy your triumphs over such overwhelming odds. Your Option Process has also helped me tremendously in my daily life. Just reading To Love Is To Be Happy With opened my eyes to so many possibilities. I will be forever grateful.
Linda Bross
Illinois
For me, the joy of Bears’ teaching has been its simplicity. I’m reading To Love Is To Be Happy With for the fourth time. It’s amazing that each time I pick it up, I feel more at peace just reading a few pages.
Gwen Glasscock
Texas
Giant Steps
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Giant StepsHere are the stories of young people at critical turning points in their lives. Here also is the story of the man who neither judges them nor censures them, but simply accepts them, and ultimately, helps them to make their own choices.
Children are born from us; they are not owned by us. They are not possessions. The fact that they are little does not mean they are less. They are free spirits for us to love and enjoy. For all of us, children can be a beautiful experience … doorways into our own humanity.
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About the kind of love everyone secretly wants but is afraid to ask for… a liberating book; the perfect gift for someone hurting inside.
Los Angeles Times
Giant Steps is a collection of inspiring stories of teenagers looking within themselves to deal with a whole gamut of challenging life situations. In addition to warming your heart, you’ll also be introduced to the process by which these people were able to reverse the direction of their lives. By answering questions about how they felt and what they thought, these young adults decided to change how they viewed their situations and were thus empowered to take dramatically new actions.
John C. Hillegeist
Connecticut
A feast for the heart. There are lessons in love for everyone here.
The Boston Globe
A Miracle To Believe In
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A Miracle To Believe InA group of strangers from all walks of life come together and are transformed as they reach out, under the direction of the Kaufmans, to help a little boy the medical world had given up as hopeless. This heartwarming journey of loving a child back to life will inspire you and present a compelling new way to deal with life’s traumas and difficulties.
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You need to read this book if you have a child with special needs! Not because it will give you answers, but because it will give you hope. Hope that there is a better way. I wish everyone had access to Mr. Kaufman’s work.
Barbara Cranston
Amazon Customer
Oh, the power of love! I did not just read this book, I consumed it. The feelings of the Sotos family were mine, as I too struggled to try and understand my autistic son. Since visiting the Option Institute® and embracing a Son-Rise Program® for our son, the changes our family has undergone have been miraculous! The son who would not hug or show affection now wraps his arms around me tight and offers me a kiss. I know this happened because I was able to change my beliefs and truly accept him for who he is. Everything that happened to the Soto’s is happening to us as well. I loved reading this book right on the heels of reading Son-Rise: The Miracle Continues. These books have changed our lives!
Jennifer
Philadelphia
This is an amazing read about an amazing family and how they transformed their little boy with Autism into the man he is today. You really can believe in this miracle.
Kay McDaniel
Amazon Customer
A Sacred Dying
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A Sacred DyingIn the “comings and goings” of life, many of us will be there, at some time, to support a loved one facing death. This book is dedicated to all those who want that experience to be gentle, fulfilling and loving for the people they so cherish as well as for themselves.
Sam Mullen and his family faced what every family has confronted or will confront eventually: Mom was dying and no one had been prepared. With the help of a very special mentor, Sam learns to embrace what is happening and ultimately teaches his whole family how to celebrate life in the face of death.
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In A Sacred Dying, the author’s use of story easily bypasses intellectual defensiveness and engages reflective awareness of dying on the level of soul. The transformative nature of this book bridges the gap between human and divine qualities only truth can reveal. I highly recommend this book to anyone experiencing loss. It sensitively weaves the therapeutic process of grief and family dynamics with a myriad of emotions enabling the reader to easily embrace the deeper aspects of relationships that never die.
Samuel Oliver
Author, What the Dying Teach Us: Lessons on Living
An inspiration. A valuable resource and learning tool. A moving, real account of one family’s struggle toward death’s transcendence through love.
Cancer Care Inc
National Cancer Foundation
A man of unique sensitivities and perspective. There is much we can all learn from him regarding transforming darkness into light.
Ken Dychtwald, Ph.D
Author, Bodymind
Future Sight
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Future SightIf you’ve ever ignored your own “visions” or intuition, this book may very well change your mind. After you’ve read this book, you’ll think twice before you dismiss your next dream, hunch or premonition. Peter and Jamie had everything – a loving marriage, a beautiful baby, and a successful business. Then, suddenly, with life at its fullest, Peter is haunted by a frightening premonition – the sense of a violent tragedy awaiting his young family. With growing surprise, he discovers that his own unspoken fears match his wife’s recurring nightmare. Caught in the shadow of their “FutureSight,” the only lifeline for Peter and Jamie is the whispering voice from within.
Barry Neil Kaufman has created a compelling tale based on the experiences that changed his life – and may change yours – forever.
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Inspired by events in author Barry Neil Kaufman’s life, FutureSight is an engaging story about a man whose life is changed by a chance encounter with a mysterious stranger. An internationally renowned author of nine other self-help books, he draws on his experience of using love and intuition to tell the story of a man who uses his growing psychic awareness to save his family. FutureSight is a book that will leave readers wondering if it really is possible to develop such intense psychic ability and to be able to apply it to their lives.
From Independent Publisher
FutureSight is an astonishing story filled with more real truth in it than you will find in many non-fiction books. As you read the insights in this book, they will ring true for you deep within your soul and you will know that what the author shares with you in this book is the truth even though it is written as a work of fiction. I can tell you from firsthand experience that it is possible to develop your psychic abilities to such a degree that the knowledge that comes your way from developing these abilities will make life easier for you than you ever imagined possible.
Frederick Zappone
Pennsylvania
Beautifully written, the scenes are lovingly created and wonderful to crawl into. Kaufman’s words form amazing little space capsules, wherein one can wander, and it’s a long and winding road I’ll gladly travel.
Inner Journeys Magazine
Out-smarting Your Karma
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Out-smarting Your KarmaSometimes it is the simplest thought that allows us to cut through the clutter of confusion and, in a moment of time, reframe our beliefs and worldviews. The reflections and insights in Out-Smarting Your Karma and Other Pre-Ordained Conditions are offered in the hope that they may gently and playfully tickle your mind to question your “reality”… and inspire you to recreate your thoughts (and, therefore, your life) so that everyday experiences become more sensible, friendly, fulfilling and empowering.
This book by best-selling author Barry Neil Kaufman (Happiness Is A Choice and Son-Rise: The Miracle Continues) was published in October 1996. Twenty-six pages from the book have been posted here on this web site for your perusal and enjoyment!
So take a “break” and have a mental snack on us… you’re sure to come back for more! Just click on any of the links below to preview sample pages from Out-Smarting Your Karma and Other Preordained Conditions.
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We recently invested in 2,000 copies of Out-Smarting Your Karma for all of the executives, directors, managers and supervisors at Southwest Airlines. I plan to share the book with them because it has great food for thought and it positively reinforces some of our core values and philosophies.
Colleen Barrett
Executive Vice-President, Southwest Airlines
The book is replete with sayings which not only help stressed out people over the rough spots in the road, but allow them to smile and poke fun at themselves in the process.
R.H. Esau
Jr. Vice President, Human Resources, The Turner Corporation
The visionary little book of quick insights cut through mental clutter and re-frames outlooks on life’s options. Don’t pass this one up!