A valuable read for anyone seeking balance, positivity, and a re-energized approach to life.
A debut self-help guide addresses common illnesses and habits that impede readers’ abilities to connect with their own spiritual powers.
Skarvellis sets this book apart from the very beginning by discussing the physical manifestations of stress and how anxieties and tensions can wreak havoc on the body’s muscular and immune system. The work moves from pointing out these problems to thoroughly exploring practices and habits to help people link to their calm, creative centers. Discussing the seven chakras and their individual roles, the author encourages readers to spend more time learning the state of their bodies—from head to toe. Discovering imbalances, he posits, is the key to returning everything to its original, stable state. For example, Skarvellis discusses the fact that Western society has emphasized right-handedness so much that it has elevated the hemisphere of the brain that is the most widely used—the left one, which is connected to the right side of the body. The author encourages readers to expand their mental abilities by using the left hand and foot just as often to combat the dominance of the left brain. Equally important in the book are personal beliefs. Skarvellis is quick to point out that beliefs that are limiting and self-defeating actually slow the body’s energy, lower body temperature, and cause fatigue, illness, and decreased performance. The author asserts: “We need to become aware of our self-chatter and choose wisely regarding what we think about every day. Collectively, every day builds to every week and then every month, forming negative attitudes that attract negative actions toward us, affecting us with many mood swings.” While the occasional negative notion might seem harmless, it can adversely affect the networks of thoughts that form people’s inner worlds and the attitudes they project. To fight this, the author suggests “Destressercise,” a practice that uses breathing, body awareness, and the altering of thoughts to return an individual to a state of harmony. On the whole, the book provides powerful, upbeat ideas. While some theories would be more effective if they were backed by research or study citations, Skarvellis delivers a compelling and credible manual.
A valuable read for anyone seeking balance, positivity, and a re-energized approach to life.Pub Date: May 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5043-7957-1
Page Count: 112
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.
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. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.
A study of swimming as sport, survival method, basis for community, and route to physical and mental well-being.
For Bay Area writer Tsui (American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods, 2009), swimming is in her blood. As she recounts, her parents met in a Hong Kong swimming pool, and she often visited the beach as a child and competed on a swim team in high school. Midway through the engaging narrative, the author explains how she rejoined the team at age 40, just as her 6-year-old was signing up for the first time. Chronicling her interviews with scientists and swimmers alike, Tsui notes the many health benefits of swimming, some of which are mental. Swimmers often achieve the “flow” state and get their best ideas while in the water. Her travels took her from the California coast, where she dove for abalone and swam from Alcatraz back to San Francisco, to Tokyo, where she heard about the “samurai swimming” martial arts tradition. In Iceland, she met Guðlaugur Friðþórsson, a local celebrity who, in 1984, survived six hours in a winter sea after his fishing vessel capsized, earning him the nickname “the human seal.” Although humans are generally adapted to life on land, the author discovered that some have extra advantages in the water. The Bajau people of Indonesia, for instance, can do 10-minute free dives while hunting because their spleens are 50% larger than average. For most, though, it’s simply a matter of practice. Tsui discussed swimming with Dara Torres, who became the oldest Olympic swimmer at age 41, and swam with Kim Chambers, one of the few people to complete the daunting Oceans Seven marathon swim challenge. Drawing on personal experience, history, biology, and social science, the author conveys the appeal of “an unflinching giving-over to an element” and makes a convincing case for broader access to swimming education (372,000 people still drown annually).
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61620-786-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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