A refreshing personal story about the path to awakening.
In this memoir, Beepat (Reiki II, 2014, etc.) addresses her journey to becoming a healer and the obstacles she faced along the way.
The author, a professional reiki healer, knows a thing or two about spiritual growth. During her spiritual journey, she writes, she faced many physical and mental obstacles and challenges. She recounts in detail her inner processes for turning her problems into lessons for growth. For instance, she tells of how she faced doubt from skeptics, as well as criticism about how her spiritual practice was incompatible with Christian values. She sets her book apart from others in the genre by offering a straightforward, conversational account of what it was like for her to become a healer. In one chapter, for example, she describes in detail how seeing healing results in her clients—as when she alleviated one woman’s back pain—made her struggle with her ego; she says that she learned to see herself as a “vessel” for miracles, rather than a creator of them. Her candid willingness to share the less-appealing parts of becoming a spiritual guide makes the book feel like a breath of fresh air: “Some walk around like they are God’s gift to everyone, strutting like a proud peacock, because they’re awakened and have learned to be a multisensory person. By some people—I of course—mean me.” Over the course of this book, Beepat successfully presents one central truth: Living an “awakened life” means addressing both the good and the bad—the virtuous and the non-virtuous. To truly heal oneself, she realized, sheer honesty about one’s struggle is key. As a result, some readers on similar spiritual quests may see the author as a role model of self-awareness and inner courage.
A refreshing personal story about the path to awakening.Pub Date: June 28, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-982206-59-8
Page Count: 88
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
These platitudes need perspective; better to buy the books they came from.
A lightweight collection of self-help snippets from the bestselling author.
What makes a quote a quote? Does it have to be quoted by someone other than the original author? Apparently not, if we take Strayed’s collection of truisms as an example. The well-known memoirist (Wild), novelist (Torch), and radio-show host (“Dear Sugar”) pulls lines from her previous pages and delivers them one at a time in this small, gift-sized book. No excerpt exceeds one page in length, and some are only one line long. Strayed doesn’t reference the books she’s drawing from, so the quotes stand without context and are strung together without apparent attention to structure or narrative flow. Thus, we move back and forth from first-person tales from the Pacific Crest Trail to conversational tidbits to meditations on grief. Some are astoundingly simple, such as Strayed’s declaration that “Love is the feeling we have for those we care deeply about and hold in high regard.” Others call on the author’s unique observations—people who regret what they haven’t done, she writes, end up “mingy, addled, shrink-wrapped versions” of themselves—and offer a reward for wading through obvious advice like “Trust your gut.” Other quotes sound familiar—not necessarily because you’ve read Strayed’s other work, but likely due to the influence of other authors on her writing. When she writes about blooming into your own authenticity, for instance, one is immediately reminded of Anaïs Nin: "And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” Strayed’s true blossoming happens in her longer works; while this collection might brighten someone’s day—and is sure to sell plenty of copies during the holidays—it’s no substitute for the real thing.
These platitudes need perspective; better to buy the books they came from.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-101-946909
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
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