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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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