A warmly reassuring and useful, if sometimes overly effusive, New Age guide to mindful fulfillment.
Feeling anxious, inert, and adrift? Time to reconnect with the Divine Feminine, argues this self-helper.
Hoem, a psychotherapist and life coach, addresses readers who feel beset by the world’s horrors and brutality, prospects of environmental catastrophe and nuclear war, and a denatured personal life divided among frenetic busyness, listless staring at screens, and addictions. Drawing on Hindu yogic philosophy and theosophical lore, she invokes a cosmic life force known variously as the Divine Mother, Mother Mary, Sophia, Quan Yin, Grandmother Spider Woman, Goddess Kundalini Shakti, and the Healer of the World. The author elaborates a therapeutic framework of “everyday soul dances,” meaning the practice of investing ordinary life tasks with a heightened awareness, sacredness, and benevolent purpose. Hoem grounds this approach in a discussion of Hindu concepts like karma, dharma, and chakras as well as her own principles of “Consecration, Constancy, Courage, and Contemplation.” She also lays out a number of concrete activities for readers to do, including dream interpreting, praying, chanting of mantras, meditating—she includes links to recorded meditation sessions on her website everydaysouldances.com—and ruminating and journaling on knotty questions like “What is your highest purpose?” The author writes with insight and empathy about the psychological discontents of daily life and provides down-to-earth, practical tips for dispelling them with everything from breathing exercises—“Next, exhale completely allowing the breath to release from the top to the middle to the bottom”—to the slow reform of habits. (She recommends picking a simple self-improvement goal and practicing it for 90 days.) Sometimes, though, Hoem’s advice takes on an esoteric and supernatural cast. (“Ask your guides, the Divine Mother, angels, and other ascended masters who support you to guide you.”) Her writing often has a mystical feel and cadence, especially when she is channeling the voice of the Divine Mother, whether in prose—“I Am both that which is and that which is not”—or verse. (“Take time to find Me. / Open. / I am here. / Always. / Forever. / I Am. / You are. / We are One.”) Sometimes these raptures can feel overdone or vaporous, but readers seeking uplift, inspiration, and motivation will find them here in spades.
A warmly reassuring and useful, if sometimes overly effusive, New Age guide to mindful fulfillment.Pub Date: Dec. 27, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-9822-3358-7
Page Count: 284
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.
Memories and life lessons inspired by the author’s mother, who was murdered in 2021.
“Neither my mother nor I knew that her last text to me would be the words ‘Think you’ll be happy,’ ” Avant writes, "but it is fitting that she left me with a mantra for resiliency.” The author, a filmmaker and former U.S. Ambassador to the Bahamas, begins her first book on the night she learned her mother, Jacqueline Avant, had been fatally shot during a home invasion. “One of my first thoughts,” she writes, “was, ‘Oh God, please don’t let me hate this man. Give me the strength not to hate him.’ ” Daughter of Clarence Avant, known as the “Black Godfather” due to his work as a pioneering music executive, the author describes growing up “in a house that had a revolving door of famous people,” from Ella Fitzgerald to Muhammad Ali. “I don’t take for granted anything I have achieved in my life as a Black American woman,” writes Avant. “And I recognize my unique upbringing…..I was taught to honor our past and pay forward our fruits.” The book, which is occasionally repetitive, includes tributes to her mother from figures like Oprah Winfrey and Bill Clinton, but the narrative core is the author’s direct, faith-based, unwaveringly positive messages to readers—e.g., “I don’t want to carry the sadness and anger I have toward the man who did this to my mother…so I’m worshiping God amid the worst storm imaginable”; "Success and feeling good are contagious. I’m all about positive contagious vibrations!” Avant frequently quotes Bible verses, and the bulk of the text reflects the spirit of her daily prayer “that everything is in divine order.” Imploring readers to practice proactive behavior, she writes, “We have to always find the blessing, to be the blessing.”
Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2023
ISBN: 9780063304413
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
A sweet final word from an actor who leaves a legacy of compassion and kindness.
The late actor offers a gentle guide for living with more purpose, love, and joy.
Mixing poetry, prescriptive challenges, and elements of memoir, Heche (1969-2022) delivers a narrative that is more encouraging workbook than life story. The author wants to share what she has discovered over the course of a life filled with abuse, advocacy, and uncanny turning points. Her greatest discovery? Love. “Open yourself up to love and transform kindness from a feeling you extend to those around you to actions that you perform for them,” she writes. “Only by caring can we open ourselves up to the universe, and only by opening up to the universe can we fully experience all the wonders that it holds, the greatest of which is love.” Throughout the occasionally overwrought text, Heche is heavy on the concept of care. She wants us to experience joy as she does, and she provides a road map for how to get there. Instead of slinking away from Hollywood and the ridicule that she endured there, Heche found the good and hung on, with Alec Baldwin and Harrison Ford starring as particularly shining knights in her story. Some readers may dismiss this material as vapid Hollywood stuff, but Heche’s perspective is an empathetic blend of Buddhism (minimize suffering), dialectical behavioral therapy (tolerating distress), Christianity (do unto others), and pre-Socratic philosophy (sufficient reason). “You’re not out to change the whole world, but to increase the levels of love and kindness in the world, drop by drop,” she writes. “Over time, these actions wear away the coldness, hate, and indifference around us as surely as water slowly wearing away stone.” Readers grieving her loss will take solace knowing that she lived her love-filled life on her own terms. Heche’s business and podcast partner, Heather Duffy, writes the epilogue, closing the book on a life well lived.
A sweet final word from an actor who leaves a legacy of compassion and kindness.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2023
ISBN: 9781627783316
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Viva Editions
Review Posted Online: Feb. 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2023
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