SPONTANEOUS HAPPINESS

Prolific health advisor Weil (Natural Health, Natural Medicine, 2011, etc.) offers a comprehensive roadmap for the prized path to true happiness.

Having addressed methods of maximizing the human body’s potential for adapting, repairing and regenerating itself in Spontaneous Healing (1995), the author turns his compassionate eye for wellness toward the inner emotional mechanisms that elicit mood spectrum, from bliss to despondency. Weil believes that contentment, serenity and “calm acceptance” form the baseline “sea level” of emotional well-being, and that internal happiness is derived and achieved from within and not from forced, external “cultural insistence.” The author’s positive narrative covers a range of topics, including the body’s vital emotional and physical interconnection and how diet affects bodily inflammation, and he offers sage recommendations on life balancing and incorporating spirituality into the fundamental goal of “optimum emotional health.” Weil effectively positions himself into the context of his narrative, sharing epiphanies on personal loss, his history of anti-depressive therapy, a healthy diet schema and his struggle yielding to the “changing contours of my own emotions.” Though the author devotes too much space to murky, scholastic sections on the history and science behind depression, his inspiring writing style breathes new life into rather mundane reminders on the benefits of exercise, sleep, meditation, compassion and holistic remedies. Complementing footnoted case studies, media articles, sound scientific scrutiny and social-media testimonials is the author’s four decades of clinical research. Weil provides sensible, accessible advice several tiers above general marketplace offerings.