The Energy Cure: How to Recharge Your Life 30 Seconds at a Time

I got really excited by this book. It's an easy read, full of energy tips for easy reference. It's divided into seven sections

1. Connect To Your Spiritual Core
2. Understand The Energy Of Feelings
3. Organize Your Thoughts
4. Appreciate Your Body
5. Assess Your Environment
6. Increase Your Passion!
7. Look to The Future

Each one of these have subsections, making it easy to find areas of concern for you right now when you need to. There were a couple of things I was able to make use of right away. I've been interested in energy work for quite a while, especially the whole question of raising personal energy, and this has been one of the best books I've read on the subject. I'm planning to add this to my collection for those times when I need a little more help.

It just has one flaw. It badly needed an edit. It's riddled with spelling and grammatical errors. However, they're not so overwhelming that it takes away from the very valuable message it imparts. This is a great book to get your feet wet in spiritual development but has something to offer students at every level.

Jacket blurb:

If the terms "spread too thin," "drained," and "strung out" sound familiar, it is because they accurately describe the chronic energy deficiency that many people experience today. The demands of a fast-paced world often pull our energy in multiple directions, leaving us depleted and overwhelmed. Gulping down Red Bull or relying on adrenalin for energy is not a long term solution but is being treated as such, thus causing many stress-related illnesses.

In The Energy Cure, psychotherapist and energy coach Kimberly Kingsley introduces personal energy management--a way to live life to its fullest while preserving and renewing your most precious resource. Learning to harness and manage your personal energy can elevate you from survival mode to a place where you grow and thrive. As a guide to personal energy management, this book teaches you to:

* Increase resilience against daily challenges by cultivating an energy buffer.

* Use the language of energy for making everyday decisions.

* Protect yourself from "drains" that exist in every sphere of life.

* Become free from self-defeating thoughts and behaviors that deplete energy.

We often ignore the most subtle signs of energy deficiency--excessive hunger, irritability, and even boredom. These signs indicate that it is time to plug into your internal source of energy and become charged from within. Instead, we often mistakenly over-consume as a way to energize. This strategy provides short bursts of energy followed by a lull, taking us to ever lower energy levels.

This perpetual chase of energy from outside sources keeps us drained. But you can reverse this downward cycle and have the life of your dreams. With The Energy Cure, you'll see how to make life-enhancing choices, not life-depleting ones, every moment of every day.

Steering by Starlight

This is the second book by Martha Beck that I've read.(I'll write about The Joy Diet soon too.) One of the things I love about Martha Beck is her style: straightforward with home truths and humour mixed in. She has wonderful turns of phrases, like this: "I also got married and had myself three rug rats, demonstrating the sound life-planning skills of a meth addict who goes bungee jumping without a cord."

It came to me at just the right time, as I was heading into the "Ring of Fire" as she calls it. In particular, her advice to "let the moment be what it is" has been a lifeline at times. Another idea I really liked was making your choices based on what feels expansive and being aware of what things make you feel constricted.

The first four chapters are a progressive mechanism to deal with challenges in your life, with each chapter talking in depth about each method. The next five deal with finding your path and strategies to help you both uncover and guide your next steps.

Some of it covers familiar ground, and it synthesizes the ideas in The Joy Diet, but I really loved the approach. I especially found useful the ideas of starting from the end and leaning into the Ring of Fire. I haven't decided yet if it's going into my personal library, but I'm seriously thinking about it.

You can read an except here. The jacket blurb is below.

How to live your right life no matter what!

Described as one of the best-known life coaches in America in media such as Psychology Today, NPR, and USA Today, O columnist Martha Beck has demonstrated a rare gift for helping people whose lives have gone off course to find their way back to authentic, rewarding lives. Now, in Steering by Starlight, Martha Beck describes the step-by-step process she uses with her private clients to help them find their way back to their "homing instincts" - their true destinies.

Bringing together cutting-edge research in psychiatry, neurology, and related fields in an accessible, substantive, original way, Dr. Beck offers powerful new methods for solving the problems that beset ordinary people. Using her trademark wisdom, empathy, and engaging style, she connects readers with personal coping strategies that are not yet widely available as she helps them overcome the alienation that is causing them to lose sight of their own North Star.

Dr. Beck identifies three stages along the path to recapturing a satisfying life:

• "the stargazer" helps readers understand why it's so easy to lose themselves and offers strategies for sighting their North Star


• "the mapmaker" uses this newly clarified perspective to evaluate one's situation and plot a course for upcoming years


• "the pathfinder" discusses the adventures that may be encountered as one travels along this new life course

Whether it's seeking better relationships, more focused career direction, the achievement of specific fitness goals, or a more harmonious lifestyle, Steering by Starlight's colorful anecdotes, case studies, and exercises will point the way.