ON BECOMING YOU

A debut spiritual health guide reveals secrets to energy healing.

When Pickett was a child, she encountered beings made of light: “I remember sitting on a beach and looking up at clouds as the beings of light appeared. I curiously observed these air-like beings who wore long, flowing, white gowns of glowing light. Their movements were fluid, effortless, and weightless.” Whether these beings—who filled her with a sense of unconditional love—were ghosts or angels, the author wasn’t sure. But they did inspire her curiosity about what happens when people die. Pickett became a nurse and spent her career working with end-of-life patients. After a mysterious illness of her own, she began exploring alternative forms of medicine, specifically energy healing using her own inherent power. With this book, the author invites readers to access their own inner energy in order to improve their health, awaken their spiritual selves, and learn to create “synchronicities, magic, and miracles” in their own lives. She shares stories from her own experience with the light beings, her discovery of her past lives (and the past lives of those around her), and the workings of human energy fields. Pickett’s prose will be familiar to devotees of the New Age motivational genre, deftly blending encouraging affirmations with spiritual tenets: “There is only one you! The sparkle of you is always the sparkle of you. You will ever glow in this life and the afterlife. Fundamentally, you are a flicker of light, the unique essence of who you are, who you have always been, and who you always will be.” But she promotes the laws of physics (motion, gravity), along with those of New Thought philosophy (attraction, interconnectedness), in an implausible way that tries to sound scientific. Pickett is not the most convincing authority on matters of health, and the book is not so cleverly composed as to persuade the audience of her way of thinking. Readers committed to inner healing may try out her methods, but their ultimate efficacy remains to be seen.

An uneven motivation work that blends spiritual ideas with alternative medicine.