December 2007 Newsletter
Online Issue # 17

Good Books

The Instruction:
Living the Life Your Soul Intended
by Ainslie MacLeod
Sounds True, 2007
hardcover, $24.95

If the idea of understanding your soul's purpose in this lifetime resonates with you, I can't think of a more interesting book to recommend. MacLeod is a psychic and the process he calls The Instruction was given to him by his spirit guides. This might strike some as too wacky to be taken seriously, but if you can withhold judgment long enough to read a few chapters, you will discover a fascinating perspective on why you're here and what you're doing, along with intriguing insights into the patterns of your lives.

The Instruction is made up of three parts: Direction, part 1, includes chapters about the ten soul ages, soul types and missions; Empowerment, part 2, covers the ten past-life fears, desires, challenges and investigations; and Fulfillment, part 3, focuses on the ten powers, talents and paths. Except for the terms challenge and investigation, most of these concepts mean pretty much what you'd expect. 

MacLeod presents a step-by-step process in a matter-of-fact style. Each chapter introduces and demonstrates a topic, before ending with instructions for identifying how it expresses itself in your life. This always involves a simple meditation to ask your guides to help you to make the identification.

The book is full of interesting client stories which ground and illuminate a process that could easily lack integrity or credibility.

The skeptic in me still questions one thing: How is it that almost every list, and there are ten major ones, has ten items on it?

”In everyday life, nothing—and I stress nothing—gets in the way of living the life your soul intended more than this: other people's expectations.”

-Ainslie MacLeod

Sound Health Sound Wealth:
The Biology of Hope and Manifestation
by Luanne Oakes
Nightingale-Conant, 2006
hardcover, $22.95

“Sound—with the dual meaning of fundamental strength and audio phenomena—is the basis of this book.”

Luanne Oakes writes of science, spirituality and health in order to share her lifetime of studying and integrating Western and Eastern philosophies. As a writer she is a master at making science accessible, demonstrating principles through storytelling, and developing innovative tools with names like Frequency Treatments, Future Memories, Crystalline Language, Your Heart's Most Treasured Desires, and Your Magical Divine Experiment.

Sound Health Sound Wealth presents dozens of topics which somehow all end up flowing together to become tools for healing. This is an innovative guidebook to help you expand your consciousness by exploring ways of thinking that increase your sense of wellness. Luanne Oakes is a gifted, pioneering healer.

The book contains many wonderful opportunities for directed writing and comes with one of Luanne's sound Frequency Treatment CDs.

“You cannot necessarily choose your first thought or feeling. Thoughts and feelings often arise unbidden, seemingly out of nowhere. You can, however, choose your second thought and second feeling, replacing fear with faith, depression with hope, anxiety with serenity.”

-Luanne Oakes

The Astonishing Power of Emotions:
Let Your Feelings Be Your Guide
by Esther and Jerry Hicks
Hay House, 2007
hardcover, $24.95

For anyone familiar with the work of Esther and Jerry Hicks this latest book follows the format of their earlier ones: Esther channels the wisdom teachings of the nonphysical consciousness Abraham. Although the process sounds peculiar, their work is engaging and genuinely helpful. The focus of The Astonishing Power of Emotions is on learning to choose thoughts that allow you to be in alignment with your true self, feeling positive emotion, going with the flow—downstream. “Nothing that you want is upstream. Not one thing that you want is upstream.”

Part I - Discovering the Astonishing Power of Emotions, contains nine chapters, but only 45 pages of material, some new and some review. Part II, Demonstrating the Astonishing Power of Emotions, makes up most of the book. There are 33 Examples ranging from I Am Totally Disorganized, I Cannot Find a Mate to People Steal My Creative Ideas, I Keep Getting Passed Over for Promotions at Work. Several of the Examples sounded interesting to me, so I read those chapters, but then skipped most of Part II, which is what many busy readers will do. Considering the cost of the hardcover edition, and the amount of material in Part II which you might not even read, this is probably a book you want to borrow from the library.

“As you begin to go with the flow, since everything that you want is downstream, you begin to float into desired circumstances and events. All kinds of things that you've been waiting for—sometimes for a long time—become almost immediately apparent to you, because the only thing that was keeping you from them was that you were paddling upstream.”

-The Astonishing Power of Emotions

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