THE ART OF BECOMING UNSTUCK

A self-improvement guide leads readers through a more conscious approach to life.

In this book, Ozdemir encourages readers to understand their emotional triggers, repressed fears, and hidden desires in order to approach life from a higher level of consciousness. Throughout the volume, the author uses the metaphor of a hot air balloon for understanding how unhelpful emotional reactions can hold people back, similar to the sandbags that counteract the heated air lifting the craft. Readers should learn to jettison their emotional sandbags, allowing them to reach greater metaphorical heights. In order to achieve this goal, the guide takes readers through a step-by-step process of becoming aware of emotional reactions, discovering the root causes of the feelings, understanding how they are expressed physically within the body, and developing strategies for responding more consciously for a better overall outcome. Ozdemir gives detailed examples of each part of the process, encouraging readers to record their reactions in a journal. The author provides sample journal entries that demonstrate how to analyze reactions, determine emotional triggers, and formulate a more conscious way of responding. The book’s examples include invented anecdotes (a husband and wife who fail to communicate; an employee who feels unappreciated by the boss) as well as stories from Ozdemir’s own life in which he candidly addresses his shortcomings and explains how he dealt with his emotions to achieve a more conscious approach to his choices and interactions. “Laws of Life” (for example, “The golden key that opens the doors to Ultimate Happiness is locked inside your body”) appear throughout the volume, providing bite-sized encapsulations of the author’s philosophy. 

Ozdemir is a lucid writer, and the manual is both readable and actionable. Psychological concepts are clearly explained, and the prose flows easily. The guide makes a solid case for its approach to managing emotional reactions and moving beyond them, and readers are likely to learn from it. Readers who are open to the idea of levels of consciousness will have no trouble with the volume’s depiction of consciousness measured on a scale from zero to 100. Higher levels of consciousness are more desirable, while emotions receive a lower rating (Anger, for instance, “is so instinctive that it belongs to lower scales of consciousness, in the range of 15 to 20,” and can be managed through physical activity). Others may find instructions like “release your fists and all the emotional charges you’ve been holding in your palms out through your feet and into the earth” overly metaphysical for their tastes. But even readers who are skeptical of energy transfer and heightened consciousness may find other aspects of Ozdemir’s process helpful and practical in moving past knee-jerk emotional reactions and developing a more deliberative method of making decisions and interacting with others. The book’s structure offers appropriate scaffolding to readers at all levels of self-improvement, making it useful to both novices and those who are already accustomed to managing their emotions. Although the overall strategy will be familiar to readers of the self-help genre, Ozdemir’s approach allows the guide to feel insightful rather than imitative.

A solid and well-written manual for emotional regulation.