«A Balanced Perspective on Mental Health»
For anyone who has read Eckhardt Tolle's work or watched him on Oprah, you'd know about the hugely popular self-help movement that focuses on living in the present moment.
Richard Carlson's, You Can Feel Good Again, was written before A New Earth, and takes the same view as Tolle, but presents the material from a more practical and psychological perspective, rather than Tolle's spiritual one.
The book is an easy read (less than 200 pages) but Carlson's message is so clearly presented, that any extra chapters would simply be literary padding.
Carlson's aim is to divert reader's attention away from the constant chatter and judgment of their mind, and redirect their focus to their "Healthy Functioning System" - their inner place of peace. His advice is balanced, straightforward and simple to implement.
So if you're looking to take the theories of Tolle's A New Earth, and apply them to the everyday, I would highly recommend this book.
Zara Stevens
Boy Meets Girl: A Pocketful of Wedding Stories
[Wednesday, July 30, 2008]
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«A sanity drip-feed»
The first time I read this book, I read it straight through and it seemed to say the same thing over and over again: I began to wonder why on earth I bought it. I am now on my third reading, and I'm reading just a few sentences each and every day. However, although the basic message is still the same on each page, "Live in the Present", Mr Carlson constantly gives new aspects to the message so that it drip feeds sanity into my brain. I wish I'd had this book 50 years ago, and maybe it wouldn't have taken so long to do its work.
[Sunday, January 14, 2007]
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«Read this book and keep on re-reading it»
Dr Carlson has written many self-help books aimed at helping us to find the stable state of happiness that naturally exists within us all. He has now written this book specifically for those of us who suffer from depression. The book contains practical truths that are so obvious that most of us miss them or at least bypass them in the rush of our everyday lives. If you are suffering from depression this book will help immensely. Richard Carlson will show you how your state of depression is as much perpetuated by your own thinking as it is by any chemical imbalance that may or may not exist. I have read this book at the same time as receiving treatment with an SSRI anti-depressant (Cipralex). While I am unsure if the SSRI has benefited me at all after 6 weeks, I am certain that this book has changed my outlook completely after two weeks and that it continues to do so more and more with each re-reading. If I allow myself to slip back into my old ways of thinking, the severity of my depression rapidly returns. The good news is that it just as rapidly alleviates when I get back on track with my thinking. The book is simple to read and may seem repetitious. However, if you are one of Dr Carlson's target audience of sufferers from depression you should read this book and keep on re-reading it. You will find that on each re-reading something will leap out at you with greater meaning than it did before. I have highlighted many sentences so that I can rapidly re-read them, and have noted down the keywords on the title page. This way I can pull myself back on track quickly. The approach takes some work to put into practice but there is nothing as hard work as being in a depressed state. The hard work, by the way, is only in terms of changing your habitual modes of thinking, it does not involve making lists and analysing things as do many cognitive (i.e. thinking) approaches such as that found in Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy by David Burns. I have found Dr Burns's book to be of some use also, mainly because it has helped me to identify particular types of cognitive distortion that help perpetuate depressive illness. This enables me to more accurately recognise when I should dismiss my thoughts, as Dr Carlson recommends in his approach. If you are depressed, low, angry, resentful, dissatisfied, unfulfilled, stressed, hurried, fearful or just not happy most of the time then read this book and keep re-reading it. I only wish this book had been available when I was aged twenty rather than forty.
[Monday, January 26, 2004]
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