A holistic guide for integrating wellness practices into everyday life all year long.
Lind, a certified yoga teacher, offers an introduction to mindfulness, movement, and stress relief for time-pressed people.
The author encourages readers to embark on a yearlong health journey involving yoga, meditation, breathwork, and other self-care strategies. First, she says, readers must gather essentials, including a yoga mat, journal, and comfortable clothes; then, they’ll be ready to set an intention and get to work on wellness strategies. Lind introduces forms of meditation, including yoga nidra (a naplike, full-body relaxation), walking meditation, and silent meditation, reassuring readers that such actions “will either drive you up the wall or make you wonder what you’ve been waiting for all this time.” Readers can learn breathwork, such as alternate nostril breathing (to “feel zen”). A practice known as “Skull Shining Breath” uses forceful exhales for detoxing. Tapping, also known as the “Emotional Freedom Technique,” can help “karate-chop through emotions” via taps on nine meridians throughout the body, she asserts. Lind highlights yoga poses that she says can tap into each of the body’s seven chakras (energy centers). Shoulder shrugs and neck stretches can help one shed “the weight of the world (or your to-do list),” according to the author, and journaling may be used to celebrate strengths, dream about the future, appreciate the body, or forgive oneself. Lind recommends writing down five things for which one is thankful each day, even if it’s as simple as “Thanks to socks for existing.” Some of the advice feels obvious or overexplained, such as “ensure your nostrils are clear. You only need to grab a tissue or hanky and blow. Throw the tissue away and wash your hands.” Overall, though, Lind effectively provides readers with a range of simple techniques to improve their mental, emotional, and physical well-being. With a friendly tone and casual language (“Yaaaas! We. Got. This”), she offers readers motivation in weekly, bite-sized servings. She also includes helpful alternatives for various activities, such as a walking meditation around the house when the weather is bad.
A holistic guide for integrating wellness practices into everyday life all year long.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2024
ISBN: 9798345797686
Page Count: 210
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Jan. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.
All right, all right, all right: The affable, laconic actor delivers a combination of memoir and self-help book.
“This is an approach book,” writes McConaughey, adding that it contains “philosophies that can be objectively understood, and if you choose, subjectively adopted, by either changing your reality, or changing how you see it. This is a playbook, based on adventures in my life.” Some of those philosophies come in the form of apothegms: “When you can design your own weather, blow in the breeze”; “Simplify, focus, conserve to liberate.” Others come in the form of sometimes rambling stories that never take the shortest route from point A to point B, as when he recounts a dream-spurred, challenging visit to the Malian musician Ali Farka Touré, who offered a significant lesson in how disagreement can be expressed politely and without rancor. Fans of McConaughey will enjoy his memories—which line up squarely with other accounts in Melissa Maerz’s recent oral history, Alright, Alright, Alright—of his debut in Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, to which he contributed not just that signature phrase, but also a kind of too-cool-for-school hipness that dissolves a bit upon realizing that he’s an older guy on the prowl for teenage girls. McConaughey’s prep to settle into the role of Wooderson involved inhabiting the mind of a dude who digs cars, rock ’n’ roll, and “chicks,” and he ran with it, reminding readers that the film originally had only three scripted scenes for his character. The lesson: “Do one thing well, then another. Once, then once more.” It’s clear that the author is a thoughtful man, even an intellectual of sorts, though without the earnestness of Ethan Hawke or James Franco. Though some of the sentiments are greeting card–ish, this book is entertaining and full of good lessons.
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-13913-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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