Inspiring workbook on fostering a more authentic, joyful life.
In this debut how-to guide, a life coach/writing instructor shares her healing journey and self-care practices, by which readers can hear and heed their own inner voices.
For Payne, “Hiding within the folds of a broken marriage kept me from looking at the brokenness I held within and kept me from hearing the true desires of my heart.” In 2010, after finally asking her husband of 19 years to leave, Payne experienced a visitation from her dead grandmother, who led her to an “ethereal elevator” from which Payne stepped out, “thriving in my life in every way.” After acting on this vision to become a writing instructor and life coach, Payne discusses the importance of “standing firm for yourself” and being guided by intuition. She touches on the science behind self-care, describing the mind/body benefits of meditation, for example, and how “your innate need to be self-filled will give you a healthy sense of self and, in turn, bring you to a more meaningful and sustainable way of serving others.” She recommends having “sacred circles” of friends and family for support, acknowledging that she herself hadn’t shown her true self to her ex-husband. Payne takes readers through a series of statements to analyze current belief systems and to take “bridging action” to reframe perspectives, many focused on becoming more open to taking steps toward her recommended self-care practices, which include meditation, journaling, and committing to good sleep, relaxation time, and communing with nature. Payne, in her debut, offers a relatable personal story with admirably honest admissions about her own blind spots and flaws. In several other real-world examples, she also draws on client experiences to showcase how one can only be truly “response-able” in life if one is “self-full.” While her book contains the same kind of mindfulness advice that can be found in similar books, Payne’s gently guiding tone and her array of useful tips—such as 10 specific routes into journaling—will be particularly helpful to those just starting out in the search into self.
Inspiring workbook on fostering a more authentic, joyful life.Pub Date: July 27, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5006-1778-3
Page Count: 150
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
These platitudes need perspective; better to buy the books they came from.
A lightweight collection of self-help snippets from the bestselling author.
What makes a quote a quote? Does it have to be quoted by someone other than the original author? Apparently not, if we take Strayed’s collection of truisms as an example. The well-known memoirist (Wild), novelist (Torch), and radio-show host (“Dear Sugar”) pulls lines from her previous pages and delivers them one at a time in this small, gift-sized book. No excerpt exceeds one page in length, and some are only one line long. Strayed doesn’t reference the books she’s drawing from, so the quotes stand without context and are strung together without apparent attention to structure or narrative flow. Thus, we move back and forth from first-person tales from the Pacific Crest Trail to conversational tidbits to meditations on grief. Some are astoundingly simple, such as Strayed’s declaration that “Love is the feeling we have for those we care deeply about and hold in high regard.” Others call on the author’s unique observations—people who regret what they haven’t done, she writes, end up “mingy, addled, shrink-wrapped versions” of themselves—and offer a reward for wading through obvious advice like “Trust your gut.” Other quotes sound familiar—not necessarily because you’ve read Strayed’s other work, but likely due to the influence of other authors on her writing. When she writes about blooming into your own authenticity, for instance, one is immediately reminded of Anaïs Nin: "And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” Strayed’s true blossoming happens in her longer works; while this collection might brighten someone’s day—and is sure to sell plenty of copies during the holidays—it’s no substitute for the real thing.
These platitudes need perspective; better to buy the books they came from.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-101-946909
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
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