A breakthrough and practical guide to achieving more by doing less, this book, and its companion CD or MP3 series Effortless Practice, offer compelling evidence that a peaceful, balanced lifestyle is our most effective tool for creating what we want.

Most of us believe that in order to achieve anything worthwhile, whether in our careers, family life, health or even on the sports field, we have to work hard and apply a lot of effort. In fact, just the opposite is true. In The Art of Effortless Living, Dr. Ingrid Bacci offers compelling evidence that the most productive, creative and healthiest individuals are those who practice effortless living. By doing less, paradoxical as it may seem, they achieve more.

In this book you will meet individuals who have transformed their lives in radically simple ways:

• The executive whose influence over her colleagues increased dramatically after she began a deceptively simple relaxation program.
• The patient who eliminated thirty years of suffering from migraines after ten training sessions in releasing unconscious muscle tension.
• The golf player who corrected his golf swing in one brief session, using a series of visualization exercises.

This book shows you how to dissolve conscious and unconscious stress through simple techniques that replace effort with effortlessness. The result is a more rewarding lifestyle that leads to physical vitality, increased productivity, creative relationships, and the freedom to express your best self.

What Celebrities say about The Art of Effortless Living

"The Art of Effortless Living is a wonderful book. Ingrid Bacci shows how easy and effortless life can be when we just let go and consciously breathe our way through life. Bravo!"

Louise Hay
Author of You Can Heal Your Life

"The Art of Effortless Living is a gem—full of accessible wisdom that can help us live more fully, freely, and authentically."

Christiane Northrup, MD
Author of Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom.

"This book contains a piece of essential wisdom—that by letting go we gain more, not less. Because most of us are obsessed with the idea of making things happen, we seriously need the lessons of The Art of Effortless Living."

Larry Dossey, M.D.
Author of Reinventing Medicine, Healing Words, and Prayer is Good Medicine

"Dr. Ingrid Bacci’s marvelously readable and immensely practical book shares decades of her own experience exploring and developing a wide range of ways of healing and enhancing health—physical, emotional and spiritual. I loved reading it, and continue to draw upon its resources of wisdom."

Elaine Pagels, Ph.D.
Author of The Gnostic Gospels, which won the National Book Award

"Here is a Book of Changes—a profound and potent guide to making transformative shifts in body, mind and spirit. At once wise and passionate, The Art of Effortless Living offers state of the art knowledge and practice in the development of the inner life. The author’s journey from mainstream to deepstream presents a model for our own self-discovery. The result can only be new ways of being for self and society. "

Jean Houston, Ph.D.
Best-selling author of fifteen books, including The Possible Human and The Search for the Beloved

"Ingrid Bacci eloquently describes the parallel lines of inner and outer healing."

Peter J. D’Adamo, B.Sc., N.D.
Author of Eat Right 4 Your Type

Ingrid has created a series of four CDs that accompany The Art of Effortless Living. Entitled Effortless Practice, this series offers you practical training in how to achieve more by doing less. Ingrid created Effortless Practice to facilitate people's ability to incorporate the principles of effortless living into their lives. Used in conjunction with the book, Effortless Practice provides you with simple, enjoyable and effective exercises for attaining vibrant health, serenity and creative success.

Each of the fourteen selections in Effortless Practice averages between fifteen and thirty-five minutes on a side. The first offers an overview of the principles of effortless living, while each subsequent selection guides you through an exercise narrated by Ingrid, with background musical accompaniment.

Contrary to popular belief, the most frequent causes of neuromuscular, joint or skeletal pain can be traced to your lifestyle: unconscious habits that involve the way you breathe, stand and move, and the way you store physical and emotional stress in your tissues. Given this fact, if you suffer from chronic pain, or treat people suffering from chronic pain, you may need to consider replacing expensive and limited pain treatment, as well as dangerous drugs, with self-help methods for reversing the way physical, mental and emotional stresses affect your muscles, joints and bones. Effortless Pain Relief presents a unique mind-body program for overcoming chronic pain. You’ll find a simple explanation of how stress creates pain, along with clear, simple and powerful self-help techniques for reducing and even eliminating pain.

The guiding principle in this program for self-healing is to develop greater awareness of your body and sensitivity to it. You can change your lifestyle habits, and eliminate your pain, by adopting body awareness techniques that eliminate tension. Chapter by chapter, Effortless Pain Relief shows you how to release deep physical, mental and emotional stress through simple breathing techniques, to consciously reduce tension in your muscles, and to master and eliminate negative thought patterns and emotions of fear and anger that foster stress and pain. Author Ingrid Bacci’s deceptively simple yet profoundly effective techniques for leaving pain behind enhance your vitality and offer an effortless route to a pain-free life. Ingrid has created CDs, MP3s and a DVD that can be ordered on line, and that will help you easily master some of the exercises described in her book.

What Celebrities say about Effortless Pain Relief

"All those who are suffering in pain can begin their healing by reading this book. After seventy-seven years on this planet, I finally learned from Dr. Bacci why I have always had such extreme tension in my neck and shoulders, and simple changes she guided me through have made an enormous difference. I am deeply grateful to Dr. Bacci for this book, and I am sure thousands of others will be."

Louise Hay
Author of You Can Heal Your Life

"The intimate connections between mind and body are a magnificent opportunity for the relief of chronic pain. Dr. Ingrid Bacci takes us step by step through methods that have transformed the lives of thousands of individuals who have put these techniques to the test."

Larry Dossey
Author of Reinventing Medicine, Healing Words: The Power of Prayer and the Practice of Medicine, Healing Beyond the Body

"Stress and unhealthy lifestyles are often the causes of fibromyalgia and other chronic pains that can make your life miserable. The optimal treatment lies not in medications, but in a comprehensive self-empowerment approach. This book covers it all and is a ‘must read' for chronic pain sufferers. It would make a wonderful and enlightening gift for your physician!"

Paul Davidson, M.D.
Author of Chronic Muscle Pain Syndrome

"This book is a Godsend! Not only does it offer state-of-the-art strategies to relieve and heal chronic pain, but it awakens a new order of body-mind awareness that can only enhance one's life and possibilities. In this surprising and splendid work, Dr. Bacci has given us the art and science of relief as the recreation of ourselves.

Jean Houston, Ph.D.
Author of A Passion for the Possible

Ingrid Bacci has created a series of three CDs to assist you in reducing or eliminating chronic neuromuscular, skeletal and joint pain. These CDs are based on Ingrid's book, Effortless Pain Relief, and, along with the DVD Reduce Your Chronic Pain, they help you incorporate the lessons of that book into your daily life. The CDs described below can also be ordered as individual CDs.

Breath Awareness
Two twenty minute breath awareness exercises for pain and stress reduction. The first is a meditative breathing exercise, and the second guides you through relaxed breathing in daily activities

Body Awareness
Two twenty minute exercises to enhance bodily relaxation and tension release. The first is a body scan and the second teaches how to release body tension in daily activities

Visualization Training
Three fifteen-minute exercises for developing visualization skills critical for overcoming stress and pain

Reduce Your Chronic Pain is a DVD/video specifically created to help you learn and practice some of the movement techniques described in Ingrid Bacci’s book Effortless Pain Relief. Hosted and demonstrated by Ingrid, the DVD/video includes detailed audiovisual guidance through movement patterns that are described in chapters 7 and 9 of the book. Because movement is learned more readily through audiovisual guidance than from the written page, this DVD/video is highly recommended as an adjunct to reading the book, for anyone who wants either to reduce chronic pain or to move more effortlessly and gracefully. Self-healing techniques that are more readily learned through auditory support alone are offered on Ingrid’s CDs/MP3s.

Ingrid has created a series of exercises that accompany The Art of Effortless Living. Entitled Effortless Practice, this series offers you practical training in how to achieve more by doing less. Ingrid created Effortless Practice to facilitate people's ability to incorporate the principles of effortless living into their lives. Used in conjunction with the book, Effortless Practice provides you with simple, enjoyable and effective exercises for attaining vibrant health, serenity and creative success.

Each of the fourteen selections in Effortless Practice averages between fifteen and thirty-five minutes on a side. The first offers an overview of the principles of effortless living, while each subsequent selection guides you through an exercise narrated by Ingrid, with background musical accompaniment.

Ingrid Bacci has created a series of exercises to assist you in reducing or eliminating chronic neuromuscular, skeletal and joint pain. These exercises are based on Ingrid's book, Effortless Pain Relief, and, along with the DVD Reduce Your Chronic Pain, they help you incorporate the lessons of that book into your daily life. The exercises described below can also be ordered as individual MP3s.

Breath Awareness

Two twenty minute breath awareness exercises for pain and stress reduction. The first is a meditative breathing exercise, and the second guides you through relaxed breathing in daily activities

Body Awareness

Two twenty minute exercises to enhance bodily relaxation and tension release. The first is a body scan and the second teaches how to release body tension in daily activities

Visualization Training

Three fifteen-minute exercises for developing visualization skills critical for overcoming stress and pain

A profoundly relaxing twenty-five minute meditative exercise focused on the breath, aimed at increasing ability to relax at will and build inner guidance.

Two twenty-minute breath awareness exercises that are excellent for pain and stress reduction. The first offers a meditative breathing exercise, and the second guides you though learning how to be present to relaxed breathing in daily activities.

Two twenty-minute exercises to enhance bodily relaxation and tension release. The first is a body scan, and the second takes the listener through releasing body tension in daily activities.

Three fifteen-minute exercises that assist the listener in developing the skills of visualization that are critical for overcoming pain and the fear of pain.

Three meditative exercises for building your ability to reduce stress and empower yourself.

Two twenty-minute breath awareness exercises that are excellent for pain and stress reduction. The first offers a meditative breathing exercise, and the second guides you though learning how to be present to relaxed breathing in daily activities.

Two twenty-minute exercises to enhance bodily relaxation and tension release. The first is a body scan, and the second takes the listener through releasing body tension in daily activities.

Three fifteen-minute exercises that assist the listener in developing the skills of visualization that are critical for overcoming pain and the fear of pain.

An excellent meditative exercise for training your ability to access inner guidance and build intuition.

A twenty-minute body-scan focused on deepening relaxation and body awareness and strengthening intuitive capacities.