Reviews - October 2007
Five Wishes: How Answering One Simple Question Can Make Your Dreams Come True
by Gay Hendricks, with foreward by Neale Donald Walsh
New World Library, Novato, CA $18.00
Many know Gay Hendricks as the co-founder of the Spiritual Cinema Circle, which has brought high quality spiritually focused and thought-provoking movies to people in more than seventy countries around the world. Ever wonder how this powerhouse of inspiration and motivation got on his path? Would you believe that it started one evening with his reluctant attendance at a cocktail party and the conversation that would change his life forever? This chance encounter would make Hendricks question his life on all fronts. For Hendricks, this shift in perspective and consciousness came down to one simple question.
Five Wishes is part autobiography, part-allegory and all inspiration. It is a simple yet beautiful tale of how changing our perspective on the problems in our lives can change the energy around them. Keeping this perspective (in other words, the essence of the question and its answer) in the forefront can make dreams come true. I especially appreciated Hendrick’s words in Chapter Two entitled My Second Wish: Completing. Admittedly, it was refreshing to know that an individual as successful as Hendricks at one time had issues with seeing things all the way through. In this chapter, Hendricks puts the problem into an interesting framework. He says, “What I’ve come to see is that completing something, no matter how large or how small, puts you into harmony with the universe.” As described in earlier chapters, the lesson for him came through shedding light on all the unresolved situations in his life—a list that ran twelve whole pages!
“In my thirties, I received the gift of a question that changed the course of my life. My decision to answer that question gave me a life in which all my dreams came true. Now I want to offer you this gift, so you can use its gentle power to create your own fulfilled life,” says Hendricks of this small, 150-page book. There are many readers that will be glad that he did. –NLP www.newworldlibrary.com
Awe: The Delights and Dangers of our Eleventh Emotion
by Paul Pearsall, Ph.D.
Published by Health Communications Inc. Deerfield Beach, FL $19.95
The late Dr. Paul Pearsall, who passed away in July 2007, was a renowned neuro-psychologist and best-selling author. He was a clinical professor at the University of Hawaii, a favored speaker and the author of more than a dozen best selling books, including Super Immunity, The Beethoven Factor and The Heart’s Code. He also spent his entire life in the study and investigation of that most sublime of human emotions, awe. What is awe and how does experiencing it affect our health? Why do we have this unique response in the first place? How can we incorporate more of it into our lives? Can awe-inspired moments brought on by tragedy be beneficial? How is awe used against us and how do we overcome the power of awe when it falls into the wrong hands? These are the questions that Pearsall put forth when he first began his Study of the Awe-Inspired investigations more than 20 years ago. They are also the basis for AWE: The Delights and Dangers of Our Eleventh Emotion, which is the post-humus synthesis of Dr. Pearsall’s work, finished shortly before his death.
Pearsall describes awe as “the most intense, wonderful, upsetting and transcendently terrible of all the emotions.” He goes on to explain that “you can’t peg it as just happy, sad, afraid, angry, or hopeful. Instead, it’s a matter of experiencing all of these feelings and yet, paradoxically, experiencing no clearly identifiable, or at least any easily describable, emotion. Awe overwhelms and drains the power out of any other singular emotion we may have had before it took hold…the best description I’ve been able to give it so far is that—no matter how good or bad our brain considers whatever is happening to be—it is feeling more totally and completely alive than we thought possible before we were in awe.”
Pearsall’s investigations were inspired by an experience of awe in his own life with the birth of his son and the complications that followed. The late Scott Paul Pearsall (who died in January of this year) was born with cerebral palsy. In AWE, Dr. Pearsall describes this incredible feeling within him as he held his newborn son and witnessed his struggle for life. Scott went on to graduate from college, obtain his pilot’s license and build a successful career as a financial advisor. Dr. Pearsall says, “Throughout my own research on awe, I have never known a person who is more in awe of life itself than my son.”
Awe is a fascinating look at this most mysterious of all human emotions and is a most delicately beautiful way to remember one of the pioneers in new-thought psychology. –NLP www.hcibooks.com