Debut author and educational administrator Popish offers innovative springboards, exercises, and tools for a more inspired life.
The author writes that she set out to find a book that could guide her to a passion-filled existence. Her failure to find it served as a catalyst toward success, however, as she began to pen this book. The result is a vibrant collection of strategies that can be used personally, as part of a group, or shared with family in order to set a daily tone. Within these pages, Popish offers fresh ideas about writing, practicing gratitude, and going on adventures to spice up one’s daily life and imbue one’s free time with meaning. The book starts out with practical habits that promise to lead to calmness and more fulfillment. For instance, the author begins by asserting the importance of sleep, explaining the science behind REM cycles and the regeneration that happens overnight. She then offers a list of strategies to make one’s sleep deeper and more meaningful, such as darkening a room, changing bedding or pillows, taking “cleansing breaths,” and listening to soothing music. Although these tips may seem obvious, they’re often forgotten in busy lifestyles. Next, she covers personal relationships, suggesting ways to find joy by focusing on strong social connections. Indeed, much of the book focuses on methods for creating joyful environments, such as by making inspiration boards using fabric samples, quotes, and photographs or undertaking creative collage. Popish also calls upon positive psychology concepts, pointing to data-backed studies on the importance of planned “spontaneity,” savoring experiences, and varying one’s joys to avoid “habituation” and a decline of stimulation. The book is well-crafted, freshly written, and explains its ideas in a logical, straightforward way, even when tackling complex psychology concepts. Along the way, the author covers a broad landscape of wellness strategies. She encourages solitude and social connection, planning and spontaneity, laughter and spirituality—all culminating in a dialectical approach that’s easy to follow.
A fun, successful collection of concepts, thoughts, and strategies about maintaining joy and living creatively.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-937498-82-5
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Elevate
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Categories: BODY, MIND & SPIRIT | SELF-HELP
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Doyle offers another lucid, inspiring chronicle of female empowerment and the rewards of self-awareness and renewal.
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More life reflections from the bestselling author on themes of societal captivity and the catharsis of personal freedom.
In her third book, Doyle (Love Warrior, 2016, etc.) begins with a life-changing event. “Four years ago,” she writes, “married to the father of my three children, I fell in love with a woman.” That woman, Abby Wambach, would become her wife. Emblematically arranged into three sections—“Caged,” “Keys,” “Freedom”—the narrative offers, among other elements, vignettes about the soulful author’s girlhood, when she was bulimic and felt like a zoo animal, a “caged girl made for wide-open skies.” She followed the path that seemed right and appropriate based on her Catholic upbringing and adolescent conditioning. After a downward spiral into “drinking, drugging, and purging,” Doyle found sobriety and the authentic self she’d been suppressing. Still, there was trouble: Straining an already troubled marriage was her husband’s infidelity, which eventually led to life-altering choices and the discovery of a love she’d never experienced before. Throughout the book, Doyle remains open and candid, whether she’s admitting to rigging a high school homecoming court election or denouncing the doting perfectionism of “cream cheese parenting,” which is about “giving your children the best of everything.” The author’s fears and concerns are often mirrored by real-world issues: gender roles and bias, white privilege, racism, and religion-fueled homophobia and hypocrisy. Some stories merely skim the surface of larger issues, but Doyle revisits them in later sections and digs deeper, using friends and familial references to personify their impact on her life, both past and present. Shorter pieces, some only a page in length, manage to effectively translate an emotional gut punch, as when Doyle’s therapist called her blooming extramarital lesbian love a “dangerous distraction.” Ultimately, the narrative is an in-depth look at a courageous woman eager to share the wealth of her experiences by embracing vulnerability and reclaiming her inner strength and resiliency.
Doyle offers another lucid, inspiring chronicle of female empowerment and the rewards of self-awareness and renewal.Pub Date: March 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-0125-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | SELF-HELP
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A teacher and scholar of Buddhism offers a formally varied account of the available rewards of solitude.
“As Mother Ayahuasca takes me in her arms, I realize that last night I vomited up my attachment to Buddhism. In passing out, I died. In coming to, I was, so to speak, reborn. I no longer have to fight these battles, I repeat to myself. I am no longer a combatant in the dharma wars. It feels as if the course of my life has shifted onto another vector, like a train shunted off its familiar track onto a new trajectory.” Readers of Batchelor’s previous books (Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World, 2017, etc.) will recognize in this passage the culmination of his decadeslong shift away from the religious commitments of Buddhism toward an ecumenical and homegrown philosophy of life. Writing in a variety of modes—memoir, history, collage, essay, biography, and meditation instruction—the author doesn’t argue for his approach to solitude as much as offer it for contemplation. Essentially, Batchelor implies that if you read what Buddha said here and what Montaigne said there, and if you consider something the author has noticed, and if you reflect on your own experience, you have the possibility to improve the quality of your life. For introspective readers, it’s easy to hear in this approach a direct response to Pascal’s claim that “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Batchelor wants to relieve us of this inability by offering his example of how to do just that. “Solitude is an art. Mental training is needed to refine and stabilize it,” he writes. “When you practice solitude, you dedicate yourself to the care of the soul.” Whatever a soul is, the author goes a long way toward soothing it.
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-25093-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
Categories: BODY, MIND & SPIRIT | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION
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