Subtitle: Simple Steps to a Luminous Life at Work and Play
Recommended to me by: Aubrie De Clerck
Maria Nemeth offers step-by-step instructions on how to move from a fog of confusion to living with “clarity, focus, ease, and grace.”
I do want to live with clarity, focus, ease, and grace, but I didn’t start reading in a fog of confusion. I did find some useful insights in this book.
She distinguishes between unhelpful Monkey Mind and helpful voice of wisdom. She characterizes Monkey Mind as insistent, survival-oriented, tensing the body, carrying a sense of dread or impending doom, defensive, and humorless.
By contrast, the voice of wisdom tends to be compassionate toward self and others, spacious, the heart relaxes, contains gentle good humor, generosity of spirit, kindness, open-heartedness, and the sense that all is well.
She reminds us to see people as whole and complete in themselves, rather than in need of fixing or rescuing.
She asks how you see your body, and then how does your body see you? I had never thought about that. I paused to ask myself this question, and my body says it misses me when I’m not present to myself. She proposes that our bodies love us, and my experience agrees.
I also found parts of the book condescending or irrelevant. She sometimes seems to forget that her reader does not need fixing. Her strangely short list of Life Intentions reads more as her personal definition of How To Be A Good Person rather than as a generally applicable list. There is far too much talk about dieting, even when she notes that “weight loss” is not a positive goal. Repeated mentions of her “thousands of clients” did not strengthen the book’s message for me.
Recommended, with some skimming.
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