Sunday, March 28, 2010

Book Review: Natural Born Soulmates

Yes, I'm reviewing another "Law of Attraction" book about finding a soulmate. I'm still recommending The Soulmate Path: Find the Love You Want and Strengthen the Love You Have, but Natural Born Soulmates: Follow Your Inner Wisdom to Lasting Love by Lauren Thibodeau has a slightly different target audience and covers a different set of issues.

The first key concept that sets this book apart is the division of soulmates into three categories: "Karmic Connections" who present you with unfinished business that needs to be cleaned up, "Balance Partners" who offer support and lessons (but not necessarily pleasant lessons), and "Heartmates"who are people to we can build happy, healthy and growing passionate relationships with.

The second key concept is a list of five attitudes that commonly block us from finding Heartmates, and keep us stuck with Karmic Connections or Balance Partners. I'll just list them, as they basically speak for themselves:

  1. I'd rather be anything but alone.
  2. But I see such potential.
  3. It's just that I love you so much.
  4. I won't be hurt like that again.
  5. All of the good ones are gone.
If at least one of the above five statements sounds familiar, then this book will have something helpful for you. The book does claim to be written for women, but the advice and concepts pretty much apply to everyone. And I promise this will be the last soulmate book I talk about at least for a few months.

Sunday, March 7, 2010

Book Review: The Vibrational Universe

I should probably start off with a warning: this review is going to be about yet another "Law of Attraction" book. The Vibrational Universe: Harnessing the Power of Thought to Consciously Create Your Life by Kenneth James Michael MacLean definitely falls into that category. But please bear with me, and don't say "Been there, done that, got the T-shirt" just yet. The book actually raises an important point which, in my opinion, is worth the price of admission. We tend to think of emotion and reason as two separate things. This book says that your ability to reason is affected by your emotional state, and that sufficiently negative emotional states can inhibit the ability to reason entirely. The corollary is that we're better able to deal with problems that come up if we can find something to feel better about first.

To that end, the book includes a scale of emotions, ranging from apathy at the extreme negative end, to serene bliss at the extreme positive end. This is important because changing our emotional state only works well a couple of steps at a time. It's hard to go from apathy to enthusiasm, but taking a couple of steps up through grief and anger works better. This also means that you can't lift someone else's mood if you're too far above them on the scale without approaching them, at least temporarily, from a lower spot.

The rest of the book won't have many surprises for those of you who have been following this blog for any length of time, but the book is a very good introduction to the Law of Attraction and related concepts.