THERE ARE MOMENTS IN life when we may fall prey to the illusion that we exist and act in isolation. “I did that!” we may think. “That was me, all by myself!” Honest reflection quickly reveals that nothing could be further from the truth. From conception through career and the legacies we leave behind, there is nothing that we can truly claim to have accomplished all by ourselves. To breathe is to exchange; to live is to collaborate; and to succeed in making even the smallest of contributions to the world is to have experienced the grace of partnership.
In no act is this truth more evident than in the creation of a book. Writing Code to Joy has been an absolute delight at every step, from the earliest impulse to the finalizing details, and to say “We couldn’t have done it alone” seems an understatement of ludicrous proportions.
This may not be common protocol, but the first acknowledgment we need to give voice to is a moment of thanks and appreciation to each other.
It is a rare treasure to have both a professional relationship and a friendship that builds and grows ever stronger over nearly three decades. Both of us are blessed to have experienced this rare treasure with each other. This book (like our previous books together) springs from that deep friendship, respect, and creative collaboration that we share, and we appreciate having this opportunity to publicly express our acknowledgment of that mutual respect and camaraderie. Peter: thank you. And George: back at you.
In the next breath, we thank “Stefanie” and all our thousands of other clients, whose experiences, challenges, and triumphs inform the pages of this book and make these principles come to life. In many ways our clients help teach us humility, creativity, and continued awareness of the perseverance of human spirit to overcome even the darkest of challenges. We treasure and deeply respect the trust and confidence that our clients place in us, as they share with us their inner feelings, thoughts, and life experiences and we work together to find the best ways to resolve the problems that bring them to our door.
Our thanks next go to our intrepid coexplorer, John David Mann, who brought to this project boundless enthusiasm, preternatural energy, unflagging humor, and a way with words that can only be described as magical. John did more than simply put our approach into words; he helped to fundamentally shape the material and brought crucial insights and structural clarity to it as well. (And we’ll reveal a secret here: the “journalist named David” in chapters 1 and 2? That’s actually John David.) This book would not exist without him.
To Margret McBride, literary agent extraordinaire and the best friend an author could have. Margret saw this project from its earliest germ of a thought to its conclusion in the book you hold in your hands, and was right there with us through thick and thin. It was Margret who found us our coauthor, Margret who found us our publisher, Margret who came up with the book’s clever title (with a grateful nod to Schiller and Beethoven), and Margret who believed in us and what we were doing even when there wasn’t a single word yet on paper.
To Margret’s brilliant and dedicated crew, Faye Atchison, Anne Bomke, and Donna Degutis, who scrutinized portions of the manuscript with expert eyes and helped bring greater clarity to the project when it was in its earliest stages.
To Gideon Weil, our editor, and to Claudia Boutote, Michael Maudlin, Suzanne Quist, Maria Schulman, Mark Tauber, and the rest of the remarkable crew at HarperOne. There are publishers, and then there are publishers: the people at HarperOne are not just a staff but a genuine community, united through their shared devotion both to excellence and to creating books that better the human condition. We need more like you.
To Larry King, for his generous and adventurous spirit, for his taking such a keen interest in our work, and for cheerfully providing this book with its delightful foreword. And to Wendy Walker and Randy Woods, and Allison and Eric Glader, Larry’s producers, for their constant and faithful support of our work.
To Debbie Ford, for her constant friendship and inspiration and for helping to bring this whole project about.
To our amazing colleagues, too numerous to catalog here, and especially to Larry Dossey, M.D., David Feinstein, Ph.D., John Freedom, Bessel van der Kolk, M.D., Bruce Lipton, Ph.D., Candace Pert, Ph.D., and Carolyn Sakai, Ph.D.: they are, every last one, not only giants in the field of health and healing but also remarkably compassionate and dedicated people. Larry, David, John, Bessel, Bruce, Candace, Carolyn: the world is an enormously better place for your being here.
To Greg Nicosia, Ph.D., and all the creative and supportive people at the Association for Comprehensive Energy Psychology (ACEP) for helping to create a forum that encourages work like ours. Greg: this book wouldn’t exist if we hadn’t known you.
Our deepest thanks to Donna J. Kimball at the Material Measurement Laboratory, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST); to Stacy Bruss, NIST Librarian; to Teressa Rush-Cover, with NIST’s Measurement Services Division; and to Anne Meininger from the National Center for Standards and Certification Information (NCSCI), for their help in chasing down accurate data on the water composition of fog. And likewise to Julio L. Hernandez-Delgado, head of Archives and Special Collections at Hunter College Libraries in New York; Kate Boyle at the Jones Library Special Collections in Amherst, Massachusetts; and Kimberly Baker, librarian at the Scripps Memorial Hospital in La Jolla; for their help in accessing Barbara Kolonay’s original master’s thesis on the visualizing basketball players.
To Brittany Smith, at the Fred Rogers Company, for her kind assistance in securing permission to use the first stanza of Fred Rogers’s timeless song, What Do You Do with the Mad that You Feel?
Thanks go to Sally and Whitney Pratt; David and Pat Pratt, Chad Pratt, Erin Osterholm, M.D., and Connor Pratt; Ginger and Darren Allen; Jill Pratt; Karen, David, Audrey, and Grace Pike; Becky, Dan, Jacob, Matthew, and Luke Cinadar; Floyd, Kenny, Sandra, Kyle, and Whitney Prater, for their love and support over the years. Also to Marcia Andrews for her encouragement; Larissa and Brenden Lambrou for their emotional support; Paula Shaw for sharing her astute knowledge of the chakra system; Michael Yapko, Ph.D., for inspiration and focus on people’s strengths; George’s father, George Pratt, Senior, a constant source of inspiration and role model for treating all people with kindness and living each moment with bottomless humor and a deep appreciation of life; and Peter’s mother, Mary Lambrou, who provided unconditional love and wise guidance, and who sadly left this world before seeing this project come to print.
To Kathy and Colt Bagley, Marnie and Howard Barnhorst, Marisa Coon, Leslie Dillahunt, Beth and Stephen Doyne, Ph.D., Rob Dyrdek, Kim Edstrom, Susan Gawlinski, Belinda Hopper, Robert Howes, Errol Korn, M.D., Ann and Mike Kriozere, Mimi and Howard Lupin, Shyla McClanahan, Stephen Metcalfe, Todd Morgan and Rosanna Arquette, Mike Nagle, Sheila Nellis, Susan and David Nethero, Pat and Jeannie Scott, Noni and Drew Senyei, M.D., Robert Stone, Tom Vendetti, Ph.D., Andres Verjan, Alicia Jarrat and Gib Wiggams, and Heather Young, for all the myriad ways you keep us sane, our feet on the ground, and our lives on track, and all with such grace, ease, and humor.
And our thanks, esteem, approbation, love, and endless admiration go last, best, and most to our wives, Vonda Pratt, Dottie Lambrou, and Ana Gabriel Mann, for standing by us, for putting up with all our jokes (even the lame ones), and for being such blessings in our lives and such integral parts of our own personal code to joy.