An appealing, helpful, and intriguing new approach to dealing with physical limitations and conditions.
In this guide to improving wellness, the author suggests new frameworks for mentally and emotionally relating to health.
Greer (Change Your Story, Change Your Life, 2014) focuses this book on the thoughts and feelings associated with health conditions and goals—not the physical realities. An experienced clinical psychologist, he suggests Jungian and shamanic practices as mainly enhancements to health treatments, not replacements. But in this guide, he artfully illustrates the power of imagination, attitude, and narrative in the way a human approaches, overcomes, or lives with medical conditions. Exploring the chakras and their links to certain physical sensations or discomforts, the author suggests emotional connections that may influence physical conditions in certain areas of the body. For example, the fifth chakra, which is associated with the thyroid and throat, is also linked to speaking truths and communicating. Difficulty swallowing, sore throats, thyroid problems, and vocal cord conditions can be associated with suppressing emotions or having trouble interacting. Greer suggests that practices aligning and balancing the chakras can ease these discomforts. In addition, the author uses anecdotes about patients who alleviated certain physical conditions—like rheumatoid arthritis—by releasing repressed emotional energy, such as anger at a spouse, rather than bottling up the feelings. Unlike other books of this genre, Greer’s well-researched work suggests “revising” the story of one’s health. Stories, he explains in this quiet and medically sound guide, define individuals’ lives and their beliefs about themselves. People hold stories subconsciously that they must break out of and rewrite in order to make changes. He suggests working with dreams, archetypes, symbols, and conversations with different embodiments of source energy to ground individuals and revise the stale stories about who they are. Readers seeking to explore new ways to develop inner calm, balance, self-love, and optimal physical health should find this approach refreshing and full of possibilities.
An appealing, helpful, and intriguing new approach to dealing with physical limitations and conditions.Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-84409-716-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Findhorn Press
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.
A teacher and scholar of Buddhism offers a formally varied account of the available rewards of solitude.
“As Mother Ayahuasca takes me in her arms, I realize that last night I vomited up my attachment to Buddhism. In passing out, I died. In coming to, I was, so to speak, reborn. I no longer have to fight these battles, I repeat to myself. I am no longer a combatant in the dharma wars. It feels as if the course of my life has shifted onto another vector, like a train shunted off its familiar track onto a new trajectory.” Readers of Batchelor’s previous books (Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World, 2017, etc.) will recognize in this passage the culmination of his decadeslong shift away from the religious commitments of Buddhism toward an ecumenical and homegrown philosophy of life. Writing in a variety of modes—memoir, history, collage, essay, biography, and meditation instruction—the author doesn’t argue for his approach to solitude as much as offer it for contemplation. Essentially, Batchelor implies that if you read what Buddha said here and what Montaigne said there, and if you consider something the author has noticed, and if you reflect on your own experience, you have the possibility to improve the quality of your life. For introspective readers, it’s easy to hear in this approach a direct response to Pascal’s claim that “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Batchelor wants to relieve us of this inability by offering his example of how to do just that. “Solitude is an art. Mental training is needed to refine and stabilize it,” he writes. “When you practice solitude, you dedicate yourself to the care of the soul.” Whatever a soul is, the author goes a long way toward soothing it.
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-25093-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.
A study of swimming as sport, survival method, basis for community, and route to physical and mental well-being.
For Bay Area writer Tsui (American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods, 2009), swimming is in her blood. As she recounts, her parents met in a Hong Kong swimming pool, and she often visited the beach as a child and competed on a swim team in high school. Midway through the engaging narrative, the author explains how she rejoined the team at age 40, just as her 6-year-old was signing up for the first time. Chronicling her interviews with scientists and swimmers alike, Tsui notes the many health benefits of swimming, some of which are mental. Swimmers often achieve the “flow” state and get their best ideas while in the water. Her travels took her from the California coast, where she dove for abalone and swam from Alcatraz back to San Francisco, to Tokyo, where she heard about the “samurai swimming” martial arts tradition. In Iceland, she met Guðlaugur Friðþórsson, a local celebrity who, in 1984, survived six hours in a winter sea after his fishing vessel capsized, earning him the nickname “the human seal.” Although humans are generally adapted to life on land, the author discovered that some have extra advantages in the water. The Bajau people of Indonesia, for instance, can do 10-minute free dives while hunting because their spleens are 50% larger than average. For most, though, it’s simply a matter of practice. Tsui discussed swimming with Dara Torres, who became the oldest Olympic swimmer at age 41, and swam with Kim Chambers, one of the few people to complete the daunting Oceans Seven marathon swim challenge. Drawing on personal experience, history, biology, and social science, the author conveys the appeal of “an unflinching giving-over to an element” and makes a convincing case for broader access to swimming education (372,000 people still drown annually).
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61620-786-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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