Streams of Contentment: Lessons I Learned on My Uncle's Farm

In his most intimate self-portrait, Robert J. Wicks--bestselling author of Riding the Dragon and respected spiritual guide, therapist, and speaker--reflects on childhood summers spent away from New York on his family's farm. He mines those memories for lessons in finding contentment amidst hectic contemporary life.

Author, speaker, psychologist, and spiritual guide Robert J. Wicks opens a window into his personal life, relating stories of the people and places that shaped his spiritual perspective in youth and early in his professional career. Now in paperback, Streams of Contentment shows Wicks as a New York City boy spending summers on his uncle's farm in the Catskills. He highlights the resonance between life in the country and the insights of spiritual writers on gratefulness and mindfulness, concluding: "The crucial calling for me now is to be content with who and where I already am."

Psychologist and popular speaker Robert J. Wicks is the author of more than sixty books for individuals and professionals, including the bestselling Riding the Dragon.

He speaks internationally about resilience, self-care, and the prevention of secondary stress to audiences from the US Congress to Walter Reed Army Hospital, from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine to Harvard Children’s Hospital, and from the Princeton Theological Seminary to the NATO Intelligence Fusion Center in England. Some of Wicks’s presentations include speaking at the commemoration of the Boston Marathon Bombing at the Boston Public Library; a keynote for the American Medical Directors Association; a course in Beirut, Lebanon, for relief workers from Aleppo, Syria; and the psychological debriefing of relief workers evacuated from Rwanda during the genocide in 1994. He also regularly speaks at the Los Angeles Religious Education Congress.

Wicks serves as a professor emeritus at Loyola University Maryland, and has taught in universities and professional schools of psychology, medicine, nursing, theology, education, and social work. He earned a doctorate in psychology from Hahnemann Medical College and Hospital and has received honorary degrees from Georgian Court, Caldwell, and Marywood universities.

In 1996, Pope John Paul II awarded Wicks a papal medal for his service to the Catholic Church. He also received the first Alumni Award for Excellence in Professional Psychology from Widener University and the Humanitarian of the Year Award from the American Counseling Association’s Division on Spirituality, Ethics and Religious Values in Counseling.