I have thought long and hard about whether to continue with my book reviews and i decided that although i am continuing with the 100 day challenge you may get a bit bored with me going on about what i am eating every day. So the decision is made the book reviews says and the weekends will be different too. I will continue with the Family History on Saturday and Sunday will be my blessing day. Then you will have 4 days of me ranting about my challenge, it is going smoothly but it won’t all be good i am sure.

So today’s book is Living With Your Heart Wide Open by Steve Flowers and Bob Stahl. This was a book recommendation from someone else’s blog but i forget which one right at this moment but it may come back to me before the end. It’s sub-title is ‘how mindfulness and compassion can free you from unworthiness, inadequacy and shame’. Big title, big message.

The book combines western psychology with buddhist psychology and then adds in several different layers of meditation. For me meditation is allowing yourself to be with yourself in total acceptance, not sure why you need so many different types of meditation. I think it could also have done with a short CD of guided meditation too, although it does refer you to a web page where you can buy the said CD.

The western and buddhist psychology along with the meditation in this book is really good. I found it informative and allowed me to discover things about myself that have been hidden for many years. It talks about how feelings of inadequacy can stem from when we were very young and from situations that at the time were out of our control, which was the case for me. It then teaches you about why we have these feeling, how to have enough compassion for ourselves to accept these feelings and either lay them down or allow them to just be part of us.

It does go to talk about being mindful in every day things. It talked about how to use mindfulness when we have negative feelings about ourselves and also how the most important person to love, is ourselves. One part of the book that i especially like is that we should create an area where we go to meditate, an area in our home where we can maybe set out a candle or flowers or something lightens our mind. So that when we sit in that place our minds and our bodies know what is expected and it can be seen as a nurturing experience.

I think because we all have different fears this book would work differently for each of us. I didn’t work through all the meditations, that would take far longer then the 10 days it took me to read it but those i did do and are doing and will continue to do i  have found beneficial. It has opened my heart and allowed me to see that’s it is okay to have negative thoughts, it not the thoughts that count, it’s what we do with them or allow them to do to us that does.

Is it a keeper – YES and a sharer.