The Office Sutras sums itself up in the first couple of pages: “The basic premise of this book is that we’re on a spiritual journey every second of our lives, not just during those times we set aside to contemplate the cosmos. The job you have right now, no matter how frustrating, no matter how screamingly imperfect, is part of your spiritual path.”pg 3
Every page there after pretty much repeats the same theme.
This book just wasn’t for me. Every chapter presents a common problem that one can encounter at work and then gives exercises that you can use to come to an understanding about it.
I realized that I was never going to do any of the exercises and I didn’t regret that in any way. Big fail.
I picked this up a few months ago because I was looking for some pointers on creating online surveys for the public library. It has some excellent ideas, but they’re buried beneath the coils of a very aggressive marketing formula.
Levesque coaches businesses to send twelve follow up emails to customers, whether they purchase the product or not. Can you imagine?
It’s no wonder that people don’t like giving their emails out, if that is the manner in which they will be used. I have to give it to Levesque- the man certainly doesn’t take no for an answer.
He describes the unique circumstances that gave him this fierce business drive and, unlike other reviewers on this book, I actually liked the autobiographical portion of Ask.
It made me view Levesque as a regular guy before he presented his over-the-top marketing strategies. I mean, perhaps if you were running your own business and needed absolutely every customer who strayed to your webpage, Ask would be invaluable to you. As it is, if the library were to employ this system, I think it would just seriously piss everybody off.
So, anyway, the some gems I pulled out of the mess: “…people essentially are only good at answering two basic types of questions when they don’t know what they want: what it is they don’t want and what they’ve done in the past.” pg 10
Bring clarity to your business through stat analysis: “We discovered that by paying attention to the right information (provided by the market), you could not only identify what sub-segments exist in your market, but you can also identify which ones are worth focusing on.” pg 53
Put the important questions first: “Generally speaking, you should expect to see a degradation in response the deeper you get into your survey. So, for this reason, it’s essential to prioritize the importance of your questions beyond the initial questions in your survey.” pg 87
When evaluating survey responses: “The reason why response length is vitally important is because it’s an indication of hyper-responsiveness, which is a leading indicator of how likely someone is to purchase a paid solution for the problem or challenge about which we’re asking.” pg 92
Why to use an “open-ended Single Most Important Question”: “To determine what buckets naturally emerge in your market. To identify what people’s hot buttons are. To identify what their objections are. To identify what their biggest challenges are. To use in concert with their demographic information. pg 97
So anyway, to get all of these tidbits in context, pick up Ask and dig through it. But please, if I ever, for whatever reason, give you my email, do not send me 12 follow up emails. Please. And thanks for reading.
Knight is an acquired taste, but I generally enjoyed Get Your Sh*t Together. Her self help books are full of useful tips, profanity, and irreverent humor so don’t pick this title up if you’re easily offended.
If you know someone who seriously needs to get their you-know-what together, this could be the title you’ve been waiting for!
Knight keeps it real from the first page: “(This book) is more of a let-me-help-you-help-yourself-help book, with “me” here to “help” when your “self” gets in the way. Let’s face it- if you could help yourself, you’d have done it by now, right? Also, unlike many traditional self-help authors, I am going to use the word sh*t 332 times (including several sh*tmanteaus of my own invention), so please do not go on Amazon saying you were expecting sunshine and kittens and got sh*tstorms and sh*ttens.” loc 31, ebook. And so on, and so forth.
We learn that she had/has anxiety attacks and had to pull her life together because it was falling apart. Not many self help authors display their humanity and imperfections like that and I really appreciated her honesty.
Plus, readers get to reap the benefits of her hard won wisdom and we know it works because she got her stuff together enough to write the book.
I really like Knight’s various life philosophies, which she sprinkles throughout.
Here’s one of my favorites: “In my book- and in the Game of Life- you’re competing exclusively against yourself. Not other players, not even the computer. … Winning is getting what you want out of your time on planet Earth, whatever that entails. It could be the house, job, car, partner, or hairstyle of your dreams.” loc 502, ebook.
Be the best you that you can be and forget about the rest. Good advice.
Knight also gives a ‘nod’ to Marie Kondo’s internationally best selling title and Knight’s thoughts about it may appeal to more readers than the original material: “At this point, we’re living in a post-tidying society. … People get their tidying groove on for a few months, or even just a few weeks, and then… kinda lose the thread. … Why is that? Well, I submit that if they had their sh*t together in the first place, the tidying bug would have stuck.” loc 2547, ebook. Sound familiar to anyone?
Among the many life issues that Knight tackles, her thoughts on perfectionism struck particularly close to home for me: “When you accept that failure is an option, you move it from the realm of anxiety-inducing anticipation into a reality that you’ll deal with when (and more importantly, IF) that ever happens. Your energy is better spent on accomplishing goals in the here and now than on worrying about failure in the abstract.” loc 3049, ebook.
Recommended for people who need self help but don’t like reading self help, probably 18+ because of the language.
Endless meetings have you down? Pittampalli has a solution to your woes. He claims that modern meetings should only be held to solve specific problems and the only people who should be required to attend are those who could take direct action to solve that problem.
I think that the idea is a solid one.
It does take some internal mindset changes by the folks who call meetings. The first step, like with any problem, is to admit that you even have a problem.
“Over time, we’ve become nonchalant about bad meetings. If an operating room were as sloppily run as our meetings, patients would die.” pg 7.
Overly dramatic, perhaps, but true. And also keep in mind: “Change is never met with open arms. Great decisions involve risk and risk scares people; it’s natural for great ideas to get attacked or, worse, ignored. I can think of no single great innovation that has ever happened without the presence of opposition.” pg 15
So, there may be an uphill battle over this, but, Pattampalli thinks, it is worth it.
The end goal: “Meetings need to be less like the endless commercial breaks during a football game and more like pit stops in the Daytona 500.” pg 20.
So, they’re necessary, but they should run quickly because: “Meetings are too expensive and disruptive to justify using them for the most common types of communication, such as making announcements, clarifying issues, or even gathering intelligence. Like war, meetings are a last resort.” pg 23
This strict definition of a meeting means that there is going to be some major preparatory work since communication isn’t going to be a part of the show. The person calling the meeting has to distribute information about the issue so that those who are attending can contribute.
“Every meeting should require pre-meeting work. Any information for getting attendees up to speed should be given out beforehand. If the attendee doesn’t have time to read and prepare, she doesn’t have time to attend.” pg 37.
But, this preparation pays off when, after the meeting, the business should have created a concrete ‘action plan’ that includes: “What actions are we committing to? Who is responsible for each action? When will those actions be completed?” pg 39. Thus addressing the problem that the meeting was called to solve and serving its function.
Most of the meetings that I’ve attended in my life have been rambling, unfocused affairs that were called to fill the monthly meeting quota that was arbitrarily chosen by management- a touch-base, if you will.
Pittampalli is adamant that this is a waste of time. I never really saw it that way because I didn’t have any expectations that meetings were supposed to accomplish anything at all. We’d meet, then get on about our business. This book has shown me that I should expect more.
Recommended for anybody who wants to learn more about the benefits of “modern meetings”. This short book has everything that you need to start changing the world, one meeting at a time.
Though a bit dated (written in 1990), Emma Bragdon presents information about “spiritual emergencies,” what they are and how to help your loved ones or yourself through it.
To begin, what is a “spiritual emergency”? : “Spiritual emergence is a natural process of human development in which an individual goes beyond normal personal feelings and desires-ego- into the transpersonal, increasing relatedness to Higher Power, or God. … When spiritual emergence is punctuated by profound emotions, visions, psychosomatic illness, and compelling desires to behave in unusual ways, including suicidal thoughts, the spiritual emergence becomes a crisis, a spiritual emergency.” pg 1.
This process can be absolutely terrifying if the person has no idea what is going on and is surrounded by professionals who are also clueless.
I think that the main problem with integrating such experiences is that modern society neither supports or recognizes them as valid: “People in our culture are afraid of speaking openly about spiritual experiences, because psychic phenomena… have been considered symptomatic of psychosis. Most psychiatrists, psychologists, and even clergy have believed that most spiritual experiences are indicative of either retarded development or emotional disease.” pg 12.
The clergy part of that passage is particularly interesting to me. These are the so-called experts on the spiritual realm, yet, when something breaks through into reality, they’ve got nothing.
Bragdon then relates numerous instances of men and women from all over the world who have gone through this process and reminds us: “In all the major religions of the world can be found examples of people … who have been through intense and sometimes physically and emotionally debilitating periods of spiritual experiences and ultimately attained transpersonal levels of consciousness.” pgs 81.
It makes one wonder, if Jesus, Mohammed, Moses, or pick-your-prophet had been born in the modern era, would his/her vision just been medicated into oblivion?
Bragdon points out that the problem is in the attitudes of the religious and medical establishments- the places that should be the most educated and accepting of these sorts of troubles: “The administrators of (religious) institutions are inconsistent in their view of spiritual experience as part of spiritual growth. The conventional religious establishment is similar to the conventional medical establishment, which is so ambivalent about the reality of spiritual experiences that it doubts their validity altogether.” pg 101.
When did we completely separate the health of the body from that of the soul? After all, one won’t work without the other.
Then, she goes on to talk about all of the different ways that these sorts of experiences emerge from drug use, sex, stress, and just life.
It is so pervasive that it seems that it must be a part of the human experience, but it is hard to study and come to grips with in scientific terms because the phenomena can’t be forced or replicated.
Despite these difficulties to categorize and treat it, Bragdon suggests that being present for the person going through it is enough: “What these people do want is acknowledgement, recognition that they aren’t crazy, and the companionship of others who know what they have experienced is real.” pg 113
So, even though this book was written 26 years ago, I don’t think that we’ve really made that much progress in that time- at least not in the arena of holistic medicine or transpersonal psychology.
No matter how many books I read on meditation, I always seem to learn something new when I pick another one up.
The Space Within is one of the more excellent books that I’ve discovered- not pushing any particular way of being, just quietly encouraging the reader to go within and embrace what’s there.
On separating our consciousness from the universal energy that surrounds it, Neill compares the mind to a book and I’m sure most Goodreads users, like me, could easily connect with the metaphor:“Think of ‘quiet’ not as an absence of thought but as the space inside which the noise of your thinking arises. What makes this tricky, at least to begin with, is that at first glimpse the noise is more interesting than the quiet …look at the white background of this page. Chances are you can still see the words, and even read them, but without noticing it, at some point you will once again become absorbed in the words and stop seeing the white of the page.” loc 192, ebook.
Why bother to meditate? : “There is a space within you where you are already perfect, whole, and complete. It is a space of pure Consciousness- the space inside which all thoughts come and go. When you rest in the feeling of this space, the warmth of it heals your mind and body. When you operate from the infinite creative potential of this space, you produce high levels of performance and creative flow.” loc 207
And more, promises Neill. I’ve meditated for many years and I’ve experienced some extraordinary things. It wasn’t always easy and it didn’t happen all at once, but I can say, from personal experience, that this particular claim is absolutely true.
Photo by Samuel Theo Manat Silitonga on Pexels.com
Thoughts are incredibly powerful things. I think we forget just how life changing your personal perspective can be: “… we live in a world of unrecognized thought. Thought is the architect of both hope and despair, the source of every color in the emotional rainbow. … But unrecognized thought demands our attention and fills our consciousness. And when we get caught up in thought, we lose our way.” loc 324, ebook.
And also: “We live in a world of thought, but we think we live in a world of external experience. The mind is not a camera, it’s a projector. We can’t tell the difference between an imagined experience ‘in here’ and what’s going on ‘out there’- and that confusion creates a lot of confusion.” loc 375, ebook.
You create your own reality- but it’s easy to forget that and blame other people for your circumstances.
When I read this next passage, I thought of How The Secret Changed My Life and the incredible importance that people placed on feeling good.
Neill points out that it isn’t anything to get wound up about: “There’s no such thing as a solution to a feeling. Because we don’t recognize this fact, we spend huge chunks of our time and energy trying to ‘solve’ our feelings by changing them to ‘better’ ones or eliminating them altogether. … When it’s okay to feel good when you feel good and bad when you feel bad, recognizing that as thoughts change, the feelings change with them, there’s no need to prefer one feeling over another, let alone attempt to fix it. And when you really see that for yourself, you being to experience more of the deeper feelings that make life worth living.” loc 457, ebook.
Happiness and Other Small Things of Absolute Importance does not resemble a self help book as much as it does a long, meandering lecture by your favorite professor.
Shapira talks about happiness, the passage of time, love, death, money, and so much more by tying it to classic literature and his own musings. I loved it.
There is little that Shapira doesn’t cover in these pages and, when you’re done, you feel as if you’ve just had a long discussion with a very dear friend.
“This little book is meant to change your perspective on almost everything in your life- and primarily the concept of happiness. … As serious and life-changing as the voyage to the land of the Things That Matter may be, it’s no less important to enjoy the ride.” loc 27, ebook. Shapira succeeds with flying colors.
His humor shines through his words. There aren’t any laugh-out-loud moments, but I found myself grinning throughout: “There’s empirical proof that How-To-Be-Happy Books are useless. If just a shred of the promises made in many of those books came true, the world would be knee-deep in incomprehensible quantities of bliss. We all know that this is not the case.” loc 73, ebook. True story.
My favorite parts were about the importance of a positive mind-set and love.
This passage is about being positive: “Anyone who has lived on this planet long enough knows that pessimism is the natural way to think. It requires no effort, like a rock rolling downhill. It’s much harder to push the rock up the hill, to think positively. Just see the effort it takes to think like (Winnie the) Pooh, to find a bit of magic and grace in everything. That is a mission worthy of the wise.” loc 387 I agree.
I also found the sections on anger and forgiveness to be very meaningful.
Here, Shapira is talking about the futility of being angry and how we can learn to control our tempers, rather than have them control us: “My wife, a chemical engineer by profession, has reached an important understanding. In nature, she told me, each substance has a typical, unique and fixed boiling point. We can artificially change it, however, by using other substances that act as inhibitors, thereby raising the boiling point. For example, anyone who cooks knows that salted water takes longer to boil than water alone. The same applies to people. Their boiling points can be raised. Wisdom can be salt for our water…” loc 610, ebook.
Recommended for spiritual seekers, happiness chasers, and anyone who wants to learn more about themselves. This book is a gem.
How the Secret Changed My Life adds nothing new to the Secret franchise, but it’s still fun to read if you enjoy hearing success stories about people who utilized the Law of Attraction.
The criticisms of it have been voiced elsewhere and more eloquently: that it is predominantly focused on material things and that it stresses being happy at any cost.
That being said, I liked the stories.
I liked hearing about how people hit rock bottom and then changed their lives for the better. I really liked hearing that you can do or have or be anything that you want. Who wouldn’t?
Here’s Rhonda in the introduction: “I want you to know how easily you can change your life, and it’s not by running around trying to force it into the shape you want. You change your life in the only way you can ever change it: change your mind, and then your life will change.” loc 47, ebook.
All true change comes from within, I do believe that. Until I typed this out, I didn’t realize just how many times she used the word “change” in those two sentences. Counting back I see… five times? That’s a lot of change, people.
I feel like this book warns the reader away from negative emotions, but they serve a purpose too. It gives you a starting point- if you know what you don’t want, then you know what you do.
I’m not suggesting that you wallow in negative emotion, but feeling it, acknowledging it, then moving on isn’t as bad as this book makes it out to be.
In this passage, Rhonda is suggesting the use of “Secret Shifters” to control your mood: “The Secret Shifters… are things you can focus on whenever you find yourself feeling angry, frustrated, or any other negative emotion, in order to change those negative feelings in an instant. They might be beautiful memories, future events, funny moments, nature, a person you love, or your favorite music.” loc 409, ebook.
I say: feel whatever you’re feeling and trust that your emotions will eventually rise again like a cork in water. Helping yourself along with “Secret Shifters” or gratitude lists or whatever is fine, but for goodness sake, don’t force it. “What you resist, persists.”
I really agreed with this next passage: “Most of us have the wrong idea about happiness. We believe that if we get everything we want, and if life continually goes our way, we will be happy. And from that belief, we create all the excuses in the world for why we can’t be happy right now. … It’s those very excuses that are preventing you from being happy now.” loc 457, ebook.
I used to do that- looking forward to circumstances or events and ignoring where I was. The journey really is the point, so why not be happy now?
Recommended for readers who are looking for a quick, uplifting read about the Law of Attraction or for those who are interested in getting started but don’t necessarily believe or know how it works. The latter, in particular, may find a great deal of worth in these pages.
As I said, I liked it, but I’d also recommend reading Abraham Hick’s books too: to learn the value of negative emotion, not be afraid of feeling your full emotions, and to learn not to practice affirmations unless you’re feeling “in the zone” so to speak.
In Uncharted, Colette Baron-Reid guides the reader with journaling, visualization, personal stories, and meditation exercises through unexplored realms of the spirit as a method for greater self knowing and actualization.
I enjoyed this book, but it felt a bit all over the place. Let me explain what I mean by examining some of the many subjects discussed:
In the introduction, Colette begins by giving some background information into what’s been going on with her for the past couple of years.
One of those big changes is that she is now channeling an group of beings, whereas, prior to this, she wasn’t.
In this passage, she’s talking about the entity helping her to write Uncharted: “It’s like “they” had the puzzle pieces, and when I was ready for them, they dropped them down on the page for me to discover. I’m not realizing that this is, in essence, what channeling an “entity” is. It’s something I never quite understood, and I’m afraid I didn’t respect its power as I should have. So I hereby surrender my inner critical cynic who doubted others when they shared their channeling stories. I get it now.” loc 55, ebook.
She calls this/these entities, Fred. Throughout the book, Fred pops up and shares a message or clarifies something. I felt as if the channeled messages could have composed a whole other book in addition to this one.
Plus, it’s clear that she’s still honing her ability to talk and understand to this inner knowing. Anyway, it “muddied the waters,” so to speak, of Uncharted from nearly the first page.
Colette doesn’t think much of the ego or what she calls the “small self”:“When you view the world through the limits of your small self, you see only the separated parts of the material world. You are guided by your personal narratives that tell you who you are based on your past experience, ambitions, and goals that were set within the Realm of Form. You’re oblivious to being part of one big matrix of interconnectedness. You forget where home is, and you feel lost.” loc 634, ebook.
I’ve read all sorts of different teachings about the ego, but I’ve started to lean towards Abraham Hick’s thoughts on the matter. They teach that the ego is the lens through which the divine within you perceives reality and that our desires are breadcrumbs along the path to eternal joy if we allow ourselves to realize them.
Hicks also says that (paraphrasing): “If you only remembered how much you wanted to be in these bodies, you wouldn’t be so quick to fault yourself and your desires. You are the leading edge of thought- you take spirit beyond which it has ever been before.”
In my mind, that is the function of ego: to express our unique personality. Isn’t the desire to be free of ego also a desire driven by the ego?
I did like Colette’s definition of co-creation, which is one I’d never heard before: “Here’s how it works between you and Spirit. You, as an individual, are always cocreating. The divine creative force is always there with you, along with spirits and allies who enthusiastically join in as you co-create reality. And you are never alone.” loc 712, ebook. Encouraging, I think.
I also liked the lesson on fate, our internal “stories” and the subconscious mind: “Listen, it’s not fun to admit that while your story about yourself has been influenced by other people and things that just seemed to happen “to” you, it was also co-written by you personally to a large degree. Fate played a role, to be sure, but you can take much greater control over your “fate.” As Carl Jung is supposed to have said, “Whatever is not brought from the unconscious into the awareness seemingly comes to us as fate.” loc 1568, ebook.
The fact that shadow dwells hand in hand with light is something that I’ve learned through my own meditation practice.
Here’s what Colette has to say about it: “In the Realm of Light, we recognize that light always exists in duality with a shadow- there’s no avoiding it. There is always a dark side to everything, a contrast between what is nourishing and loving and what is draining and entangled in fear, anger, or hatred. Those emotions will always exist, but they don’t have to overwhelm you or scare you away from the process of co-creation and transformation.” loc 1892, ebook. I believe that is true.
As for the movement through Colette’s “realms”, it reminded me of shamanistic work by Robert Moss. I’m not sure about the order in which she explores things (seems like every teacher has a different way to do it), but I think that, if your intention is greater self knowledge and if you practice what Colette teaches, you will find it.
In fact, if you try just a fraction of what she suggests in Uncharted, you will learn something about yourself. She gives plenty of exercises to attempt in here if one particular method doesn’t speak to you.
Recommended mainly for the New Age enthusiasts because of the subject matter, methods, and channeled material, but also for anyone who is curious about finding and embodying one’s authentic power.
The Help Desk Book Blog 