The Practice of Being Alive – Paperback Edition

AVAILABLE FOR PREORDER: RELEASE DATE 13 OCTOBER 2026

Printed and shipped from the US, UK, Canada, and Australia, with worldwide delivery. Allow 1–2 weeks for production and shipping.

About the Book

Most of us don't go missing from our lives all at once. We keep everything running — the work, the messages, the ordinary days — and step back from our own experience by inches, until we're living a little outside it. Nothing breaks. Nothing looks wrong. We're simply no longer quite here.

THE PRACTICE OF BEING ALIVE is about that distance — the slow thinning of the ground beneath a life — and how we come back into contact with it. It names a kind of health we don't have a word for: not of the body, which we call physical, or of the mind, which we call mental, but of your relationship to your own existence.

And instead of one more program for fixing yourself, it offers something plainer and sturdier — a way of staying inside the life you're actually living, without waiting for it to resolve.

For anyone who is functioning fine and still feels absent, this is a book about coming back.

Book Specs

• Perfect-bound paperback (148 pages)
• White paper chosen for ease while reading
• Matte laminated cover
• Includes complimentary eBook copy (you will be directed to the download page immediately after checkout)
• Author: Jim Palmer
• Published 2026
• ISBN: 978-1-0672817-4-8 (pbk)

For more info visit the Publisher page.

About the Author

Jim Palmer is the founder of the Center for Non-Religious Spirituality and the Institute for Existential Health. A published author, educator, theologian, and certified spiritual director, he has spent decades helping people navigate questions of meaning, identity, purpose, spirituality, and self-trust beyond inherited certainties.

Drawing from existential philosophy, psychology, anthropology, neuroscience, spirituality, and human development, Jim has developed an interdisciplinary framework for understanding how human beings navigate meaning, belonging, mortality, uncertainty, and human flourishing in a rapidly changing world. He is the creator of the Existential Health Practitioner Training and Certification Program and the principal architect of its theoretical foundations, curriculum, and practitioner methodology.

Jim is the author of eight books and writes extensively on existential health, meaning-making, religious deconstruction and reconstruction, post-religious spirituality, and the search for a life worth living.

Through his writing, teaching, and institutional leadership, he is helping establish existential health as a distinct field of inquiry and practice dedicated to strengthening humanity's capacity to engage life's deepest questions with wisdom, courage, and integrity.