A refreshingly unconventional blend of science and spirituality.
A psychotherapist articulates a more holistic approach to healing trauma and restoring well-being.
Church (Gestures of the Heart, 2004) argues that only a “unified self” truly experiences well-being and that “whole-person intelligence” is actually based in “a systemic model of heart-mind-body.” Trauma and anxiety are not merely plagues of the mind, but disorders that reside deeply in the body, and so an effective therapeutic response requires more than merely talk therapy—a brain addled with emotional turmoil needs to be physically rewired. The author furnishes a detailed account of what such a comprehensive response looks like, which recruits the aid of “Harmonize Now Tools,” strategies of visualization and somatic gestures designed to restore the brain’s harmony. She explains—with the helpful use of Porter’s (Bobbie the Wonder Dog, 2016, etc.) illustrations—the way in which various self-administered touches and movements as well as intentional visualizations can stimulate the parts of the nervous system and brain hobbled by trauma: “I am interested in the linkage between the brain stem, the limbic system, and cortical knowing. Or, in other words, listening to the body, feeling feelings, and being insightful, and the joy of bringing all three together.” Church’s approach is spiritually infused—there is no shortage of references to “The Divine” and the “Higher Self”—but also pragmatically empirical, insisting on discernible results as a guide to what works and what doesn’t. The book isn’t designed to be a replacement for therapy—in fact, it’s principally addressed to other therapists, though the writing is so lucid it should be accessible to a wide audience. Even Church’s lengthy and detailed discussions of neuroscience and physiology—both captivating and rigorous—are conducted in marvelously clear terms. But occasionally, the author waxes philosophic in a way that goes well beyond the scientifically demonstrable and is confusedly vague: for example, her understanding of the “luminosity” of the divine is more poetic than articulate.
A refreshingly unconventional blend of science and spirituality.Pub Date: July 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-62901-542-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Inkwater Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 4, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A lovely, painful book: Walker's finest work yet.
Walker (In Love and Trouble, Meridian) has set herself the task of an epistolary novel—and she scores strongly with it.
The time is in the Thirties; a young, black, Southern woman named Celie is the primary correspondent (God being her usual addressee); and the life described in her letters is one of almost impossible grimness. While young, Celie is raped by a stepfather. (Even worse, she believes him to be her real father.) She's made to bear two children that are then taken away from her. She's married off without her consent to an older man, Albert, who'd rather have Celie's sister Nettie—and, by sacrificing her body to Albert without love or feeling, Celie saves her sister, making it possible for her to escape: soon Nettle goes to Africa to work as a Christian missionary. Eventually, then, halfway through the book, as Celie's sub-literate dialect letters to God continue to mount (eventually achieving the naturalness and intensity of music, equal in beauty to Eudora Welty's early dialect stories), letters from Nettie in Africa begin to arrive. But Celie doesn't see them—because Albert holds them back from her. And it's only when Celie finds an unlikely redeemer—Albert's blues-singer lover Shug Avery—that her isolation ends: Shug takes Celie under her wing, becomes Celie's lover as well as Albert's; Shug's strength and expansiveness and wisdom finally free up Nettie's letters—thus granting poor Celie a tangible life in the now (Shug's love, encouragement) as well as a family life, a past (Nettie's letters). Walker fashions this book beautifully—with each of Celie's letters slowly adding to her independence (the implicit feminism won't surprise Walker's readers), with each letter deepening the rich, almost folk-tale-ish sense of story here. And, like an inverted pyramid, the novel thus builds itself up broadeningly while balanced on the frailest imaginable single point: the indestructibility—and battered-ness—of love.
A lovely, painful book: Walker's finest work yet.Pub Date: June 28, 1982
ISBN: 0151191549
Page Count: 316
Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1982
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
PERSPECTIVES
The previous books of this author (Devil of a State, 1962; The Right to an Answer, 1961) had valid points of satire, some humor, and a contemporary view, but here the picture is all out—from a time in the future to an argot that makes such demands on the reader that no one could care less after the first two pages.
If anyone geta beyond that—this is the first person story of Alex, a teen-age hoodlum, who, in step with his times, viddies himself and the world around him without a care for law, decency, honesty; whose autobiographical language has droogies to follow his orders, wallow in his hate and murder moods, accents the vonof human hole products. Betrayed by his dictatorial demands by a policing of his violence, he is committed when an old lady dies after an attack; he kills again in prison; he submits to a new method that will destroy his criminal impulses; blameless, he is returned to a world that visits immediate retribution on him; he is, when an accidental propulsion to death does not destroy him, foisted upon society once more in his original state of sin.
What happens to Alex is terrible but it is worse for the reader.
Pub Date: Jan. 8, 1962
ISBN: 0393928098
Page Count: 357
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1962
SEEN & HEARD
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