EVERYDAY SOUL DANCES

Feeling anxious, inert, and adrift? Time to reconnect with the Divine Feminine, argues this self-helper.

Hoem, a psychotherapist and life coach, addresses readers who feel beset by the world’s horrors and brutality, prospects of environmental catastrophe and nuclear war, and a denatured personal life divided among frenetic busyness, listless staring at screens, and addictions. Drawing on Hindu yogic philosophy and theosophical lore, she invokes a cosmic life force known variously as the Divine Mother, Mother Mary, Sophia, Quan Yin, Grandmother Spider Woman, Goddess Kundalini Shakti, and the Healer of the World. The author elaborates a therapeutic framework of “everyday soul dances,” meaning the practice of investing ordinary life tasks with a heightened awareness, sacredness, and benevolent purpose. Hoem grounds this approach in a discussion of Hindu concepts like karma, dharma, and chakras as well as her own principles of “Consecration, Constancy, Courage, and Contemplation.” She also lays out a number of concrete activities for readers to do, including dream interpreting, praying, chanting of mantras, meditating—she includes links to recorded meditation sessions on her website everydaysouldances.com—and ruminating and journaling on knotty questions like “What is your highest purpose?” The author writes with insight and empathy about the psychological discontents of daily life and provides down-to-earth, practical tips for dispelling them with everything from breathing exercises—“Next, exhale completely allowing the breath to release from the top to the middle to the bottom”—to the slow reform of habits. (She recommends picking a simple self-improvement goal and practicing it for 90 days.) Sometimes, though, Hoem’s advice takes on an esoteric and supernatural cast. (“Ask your guides, the Divine Mother, angels, and other ascended masters who support you to guide you.”) Her writing often has a mystical feel and cadence, especially when she is channeling the voice of the Divine Mother, whether in prose—“I Am both that which is and that which is not”—or verse. (“Take time to find Me. / Open. / I am here. / Always. / Forever. / I Am. / You are. / We are One.”) Sometimes these raptures can feel overdone or vaporous, but readers seeking uplift, inspiration, and motivation will find them here in spades.

A warmly reassuring and useful, if sometimes overly effusive, New Age guide to mindful fulfillment.