The Ultimate Happiness Prescription – Deepak Chopra

Click to buy from Amazon

The Ultimate Happiness Prescription was the thinnest book on the stack so it bumped the 400, 500 and 900+ page monsters aside. Deepak Chopra rides to the rescue on a day hijacked by too much real life. Good message for the frazzled, in any case. The book explores spiritual and neurological dispositions toward emotional equanimity and follows each of seven keys (Deepak Chopra likes to write self-help books in lists of seven) with some simple steps to move your happiness set point up on the scale.

It’s quite sensible, not very woo-woo at all. Body awareness provides clues to how you really feel about events, circumstances and decisions. Chopra examines the interrelatedness of matter, the energy field consisting of the entire universe and you in it, as he tells you to pay attention to what you feel and where in the body you feel it. Stress affects certain areas, anger and fear others—by bringing awareness to physical feelings you can mitigate and even heal what might be making you unhappy, or unwell.

There’s a very good section on being present in the moment. Nothing new about the teaching—it is thousands of years old—but it is a powerful catalyst for change. The point is that happiness can only exist in the moment because the past is over and the future does not yet exist. That seems obvious but we cart around so much baggage that we seldom devote full awareness and appreciation to the present. Chopra recommends a mindfulness practice to increase present-moment awareness. He emphasizes the benefits of meditation as well.

I tend to like Chopra’s audio and video lectures more than his books. Those events seem to treat subjects in greater depth than the slim, nicely laid-out books. But The Ultimate Happiness Prescription is worth the relatively short amount of time it takes to read it and probably worth a few re-reads, too. The activities Chopra suggests and the points he makes apply to every type of self-improvement effort. In the end, he delivers an introduction to the quest for enlightenment—not some exalted mystical state but a better, saner, more intelligent and, well, happier way to live in this world.

The Ultimate Happiness Prescription: 7 Keys to Joy and Enlightenment   Deepak Chopra | Harmony Books 2009

Clear Your Clutter with Feng Shui – Karen Kingston

Click to buy from Amazon

It’s been a year of releasing things to make room for whatever brave new world is pushing up from this 21st century compost heap. Just now I am hauling boxes of books to the used bookseller and donating the overflow to the library. So hard to let go of a book. But we are overwhelmed by hardcovers, paperbacks, museum catalogs, picture books–and we need the space.

One yellowing paperback that gets to stay is Karen Kingston’s Clear Your Clutter with Feng Shui. I’ve blogged about her books before. She works from the premise that clutter is a reflection of the inner you–uh oh–and that there are reasons that go beyond mere traffic flow and hygiene to become clutter-free. It’s a very basic primer, setting out the simplest principles of Feng Shui and exploring the reasons how and why clutter happens–and what you should do about it.

One interesting idea is that unfinished projects, even when neatly stowed, are clutter because they block the energy flow in your life. That afghan half-completed and folded neatly in the craft box? Clutter. Organized shoeboxes of photographs waiting for the day they slip into an album? Clutter. Paper clutter is a biggie and other people’s clutter can be fatal. It’s a huge mistake to take in the family leavings–Aunt Theoora’s carved walnut dining set and gilt-edged china are clutter in your attic. If you have a serious problem with stuff bequeathed to you that piles up–and up and up–you could create unhealthy conditions in your home and even block fire exits.

But the typical clutter is more modest–a closet crammed with clothes that might fit again someday or just need a zipper fixed or a new hem. Kitchen cabinets house seldom- or never-used appliances–when was the last time you made air-popped popcorn or homemade waffles? Charming collectibles can be clutter–porcelain kittens are cute but they take time to dust and proliferate all over shelves and tabletops. Email should be use-and-lose, not save-to-deal-with-later; ditto snail mail.

Kingston offers some pain-free, or almost pain-free, ways to get started clearing out your clutter. She tells you how to do a simple space clearing to get the energy moving and motivate you to get out the trash bags. Space clearing, a spiritual practice, is best done after you lose the clutter but it can jump-start things for the habitual procrastinator. A single junk drawer could be the opening sortie–you might feel so virtuous that you immediately tackle the garage.

And while you’re at it, Kingston says not to overlook your body and your mind. A daily meditation practice can interrupt the useless chatter and worry loop that occupies your mind most of the time. A detox and a cleaner diet will help your body to get rid of the junk you dumped in there. I love to imagine the sleek, pared down surroundings of the annoyingly healthy person at the conclusion of all this admirable Feng Shui–boundless energy sparkling over everything. Just as soon as I get these last few boxes of books out of here, and dust all the bookshleves, reorganize the remaining books, reshelve all the books on the window seat, the chest, the floor…

Clear Your Clutter With Feng Shui   Karen Kingston | Broadway Books 1999

Related post:

Creating Sacred Space with Feng Shui 

The Fire Starter Sessions – Danielle LaPorte

Click to buy from Amazon

Danielle LaPorte crams a lot of type into The Fire Starter Sessions—bold black large fonts and tiny san serif and some red, italic and gray here and there for emphasis. It’s as visual as it is legible. The messages are hard to ignore—which is the point. TFSS is a wake-up call from a Type-A, high-enthusiasm, self-help guru who believes that balance is overrated and doing what you say you’re going to do is the secret of success.

LaPorte is pithy, funny, hip, direct and wise. She’s produced a caffeine-jolt of a book that stuffs you in the mouth of the cannon, aims it at a Really Big Goal and lights the fuse. Since death is inevitable, LaPorte writes, your only intelligent choice is to live your passion—and then she tells you how to do it. Part attitude, part tunnel vision and part divine inspiration will start a business, achieve enlightenment, capture the heart of Rhett Butler, sail you through medical school, raise joyful kids, compose a symphony, invent the next technology after Apple.

All the clever turns of phrase, colloquialisms, cussing and conniving keep the pages moving and the message coming. No slacking, no drudgery, no fuzzy thinking, no selling yourself short. First define your self because, like it or not, you are a brand. Know thyself—and really take some time to find out what floats your boat and which is your favorite flavor. Get spiritual—not all tangled up in religion–uncluttered by meditation, yoga, tree-hugging, journal-keeping, making time and room to just be so the creative ideas will arrive in that cleared space.  

TFSS is crammed with suggestions for positive thinking, from post-it notes with one-word reminders to ditching the daily planner and immersing yourself in the flow. Pick your heroes, Gandhi and Lady GaGa, and write down four of their traits you admire—then acquire those traits. Make art that feels good—why would anyone want evidence of your enforced industry? It will have struggle written all over it and you won’t have had any fun. Remember that inevitability thing about death? Don’t waste your life.

Starting fires looks like your best and only choice as you devour big chunks of this book. It is served up in big chunks, so you won’t be perusing it sedately. From the flaming red cover to the pyromaniacal advice inside, The Fire Starter Sessions will incite you to blaze a new trail through the weedy dullness of your days, embrace your most combustible ideas, prioritize what is sacred to you, and shine.

The Fire Starter Sessions: A Soulful + Practical Guide to Creating Success on Your Own Terms   Danielle LaPorte | Crown  2012

Peace is Every Step – Thich Nhat Hanh

Click to buy from Amazon

Thich Nhat Hanh, the Buddhist monk who organized the Buddhist Peace Delegation to the Paris Peace Talks in 1969, has written numerous beautiful slender volumes dense in mindfulness philosophy and practical teachings. Peace is Every Step, introduced by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, translates the mindfulness practice into ordinary life. It is infused with the gentle wisdom Nhat Hanh has shared with readers and audiences since the turbulent 60s and is no less appropriate for these tumultuous times.

Nhat Hanh’s point is that we cannot just work for, legislate or impose peace—we have to become peace to have any influence on our surroundings, our government and on the health of the planet. His is a very empowering teaching. By paying close attention to the moments of our lives, we enter that still space of perfect balance, of being fully present in the now, and release all chaos and confusion.

The book is divided into three main sections—each consisting of subheads with precepts, inspiration and examples to make mindfulness absolutely clear. Breathe! You are Alive outlines how to eat, wash the dishes and walk mindfully with instructions about the attention to the breath that returns your consciousness to the moment. Transformation and Healing deals with anger, love and compassion. Nhat Hanh explains a way to hug using three deep meditation breaths to anchor yourself firmly in the connection. It sounds a little bit awkward but extremely cool. Peace is Every Step talks about real awareness of the immediate and extended world around you, seen and unseen suffering, and how to contemplate clouds when you are the river.

Thich Nhat Hanh is one of the great masters of mindfulness meditation and his appeal to many people is his approachability and his no-fuss notions of how to live a richly rewarding and generous life. From politics to ecology to watching leaves color and fall in autumn, Peace is Every Step is a prescription for healing ourselves and our fractured planet, a do-it-yourself manual for replacing fear, enmity and confusion with a serene and sustainable existence.  

Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life   Thich Nhat Hanh | Bantam Books  1992

DO – A.C. Ping

Click to buy from Amazon

No, try not! Do or do not! There is no try. I just love that. Yoda is my guru. And A.C. Ping leads off a second packed volume of his self-help trilogy with Yoda’s line from The Empire Strikes Back. DO is the lime-green paperback, appearing between Ping’s other well-received books, BE and FAITH, and it is packed with pragmatic tips and observations culled from traditional and new age spiritual teachings. Ping wastes no time getting to the call to action. This is a serious guide for personal transformation and its mantra might be “no excuses.”

There are lots of good examples of the teachings in action, from the certainty required to manifest through creative visualization to an admonition to “Change your story” when it isn’t going well. Accompanying the advice are methods for doing so—not thinking about it or trying to do it but moving in the direction of your dream. Ping talks about the risk inherent in putting everything on the line, and the necessity for doing so. He gets pretty explicit about it, confessing incidents when he convinced himself to take the easy way out and then missed an important opportunity for growth.

“There is no road” said poet Antonio Machado. “We make the road by walking.” (Another favorite quote.) DO is the imperative, the active verb that machetes the underbrush and clears the way. There is nothing startling and brand new in Ping’s prescriptions. You can find advice about meditating to build inner strength and clarity, evaluating energy transactions between people to determine whether they are positive, writing intentions down to concretize them, daring to be honest and authentic even when it makes you uncomfortable, cultivating the patience to wait for exactly what you want and need and then going for it. The virtue of the book is that so many of the classic teachings about self-realization and creating your own life are contained in one place.

DO would be a great carry-along for a blast of inspiration when you’re stuck in a line or commuting to work. It’s a practical workbook with space to make your own notes as you adapt the ideas to your life and experience. In some ways, this is a compact primer of common sense but it’s full of universal principles, not homespun. Ping’s message is a digest of all the nuggets of wisdom in all those volumes of self-help you’ve read—or despaired of ever reading. Dip into it in the library or the bookstore and see if it speaks to you. Just do it.

Do   A.C. Ping | Marlowe & Company   2004

The Divine Matrix – Gregg Braden

Click to buy from Amazon

Gregg Braden’s The Divine Matrix: Bridging Time, Space, Miracles and Belief is several parts encouraging and several degrees of confusing. Braden takes physics as a starting point for an exploration of how reality is constructed from imagination. Quantum theory includes an energy field, referred to by some scientists as a matrix, and Braden borrows from scientific theory, mystic poetry, philosophy, anecdote and spiritual teachings to make his case.

His premise encompasses instantaneous healing, “seeing” across time and space, the nonverbal, non-contiguous communication between hearts, the demonstrable effect of the viewer upon the object or procedure viewed, the holographic nature of the universe, and how to rewrite the “code” of reality through imagination, emotion and intention. It’s pretty heady stuff and meant to be very empowering.

The “DNA phantom effect” is a phenomenon in which strands of DNA are shown to have an ongoing effect on the arrangement of photons, even when the DNA is removed from proximity. In other words, matter can affect matter through relationship, even at a distance. And a DNA sample, removed from a volunteer who was then isolated in another room and exposed to emotional stimuli, responded with electrical charges at the same instant that the emotions registered in the subject. Scientists were able to measure this response at several hundred feet but it still happened at several hundred miles. The experiment points to an energy field that exists to host an immediate and continual connection in living tissues. Or it might prove, as Braden surmises, that everything already exists in everything else—no separation.       

What this means for you is that your thoughts and emotions are not in the least ephemeral. They bring things and events into being. If that is correct, then you design and generate your own life. Your emotions have an effect on all around you and influence objects farther away than you realize. By controlling your mind and feelings, theoretically, you could create or change your world. That is an absolutely riveting possibility. It mirrors the “Law of Attraction” concepts popularized in numerous books and in films like The Secret and What the Bleep Do We Know? And it may well be that mystics like Rumi and nuclear physicists running the Hadron Collider have more in common than we perceive.   

The science, as promised, is presented in clear, easy-to-grasp language. Unfortunately, although there are annotations throughout the text for quoted scriptures and published studies, you have to be well-acquainted with the science or take it on faith that Braden’s interpretation of scientific discovery to back up his own theories is sound. While I’m not much in the mood for scientific papers and PhD dissertations these days, I am never quite comfortable taking science on faith. And I am only an armchair physicist and neophyte theologist, if that.

So I read with interest, agreed with many of the assumptions in the book, and closed it still considering the material to be assumptions, as far as I am capable of determining. Maybe some empirical experimentation is in order to test cause and effect before embracing the ideas about manifestation and matrices. I do think there’s something to The Divine Matrix—it makes intuitive sense–but I’ll have to read more physics and reflect on the spiritual teachings Braden cites to create my own synthesis.

The Divine Matrix: Bridging Time, Space, Miracles, and Belief   Gregg Braden | Hay House   2007

Lost and Found – Geneen Roth

Click to buy from Amazon

Geneen Roth has a problem with money. In Lost and Found, she details failed investments with a longtime embezzling accountant and an entire life savings lost in the Madoff Ponzi scheme. The Madoff debacle inspired the book—and it inspired the deep introspection that led to an examination of what money had meant to her as a little girl. All things are related, very good Buddhism and very good money wisdom.

Roth is a workshop leader and the author of a bestselling book Women Food and God. She has spent decades battling her own dysfunctional relationship to food—yo-yo dieting and every unhealthy diet and bingeing practice on the planet make her a knowledgeable and compassionate weight issues coach. But her meditation and inquiry practice, so useful in sorting out the food thing, also provided the ground and the strength to help her cope with overnight impoverishment at age 56 (with a hefty mortgage and no idea how money works at all).

The book gives numerous examples, culled from Roth’s endless discussions with fellow financial sufferers and interviews with holistic financial advisors and people she quizzed in checkout lines and at parties. A fugue state is a customary reaction to money conversations and attempts to grapple with understanding personal economics. A sense of panic or exhaustion is not uncommon. Unwillingness to probe for the early beliefs about money we learn in our families—very uncomfortable scrutiny for most of us—leads too often to financial illiteracy and abdication of responsibility. The abdication comes with very high interest or outright fraud. Who takes your money—MasterCard or Madoff?

The same issues surrounding food cluster all over money and it is the topic even more radioactive than sex or politics for party chatter. Roth recommends sitting on a meditation cushion and steeling yourself to look, unflinching, at what comes up. But she assures us that a willingness to confront the past is precisely what will free us from it. If you grew up with concepts of scarcity—they are probably as much about unconditional love and enough attention as they are about your bank balance. In fact, those issues are likely reflected in your bank balance. If money was a wall to hide behind in a loveless house then you may avoid having it to dodge the risk of a loveless relationship. Or you might have inherited the conviction that people who have money are greedy or predatory or “bad.” Maybe money equates for you with loss of friends or social position. Maybe it confers on you a sense of entitlement or a lack of empathy. There are as many ways to be out of harmony with money as there are erroneous myths about it.

Money isn’t real, Roth reminds us. At least not real in the same way as sunshine, shelter, sustenance and people. Money is part of what you can’t take with you but it does give you freedom to make choices while you are an embodied wage slave or fortunate heiress. And an important way to view investments is to follow the money to where it works. Does the high tech stock keep climbing on the backs of child laborers in the developing world? Are you benefitting from that windfall the energy company reaps from drilling—and spilling–in a fragile environment? Should you be putting your money where your beliefs are—at least some of it?

Lots of good advice and shrewd observation in this tale of goodies and gambling. Geneen Roth might not have a million dollars anymore—actually, she never had it, Bernie Madoff did—but she managed to keep her house and even patch the leaky roof on it.  In the process of dealing with loss, she found a few major fault lines to address and rediscovered what really mattered to her–a significant windfall, in her opinion. 

There may be no FDRs with the political will to tackle the great American 21^st Century Depression (call it what it is, please) but there are some profound individual antidotes to be applied. Audit your own mind, isolate your own money issues, let go of hereditary beliefs and allot some investment to your own good causes. Figure out how to fill the holes in your soul with compassion, not compulsive shopping. And steer clear of anyone Roth chooses as an investment advisor—she admits she’s still trying to figure all that out.

Lost and Found: One Woman’s Story of Losing Her Money and Finding Her Life   Geneen Roth | Viking   2011

Change Your Story, Change Your Life – Stephanie S. Tolan

Click for kindle edition

Stephanie Tolan wrote an essay about gifted childen called “Is It a Cheetah?” It’s fairly well-known in gifted homeschooling circles and it is a cogent argument for honoring the intelligence of children and providing the level of challenge and the variety of subjects they need. Her Newbery Honor novel, Surviving the Applewhites, about a very unconventional unschooling family and the delinquent who is placed in their care as a last resort, is a delight and mirrors many of the tenets of our own unschooling journey in a conventional, competitive, consumer-driven society. So I was predisposed to enjoy a book-length exploration of the power of story when I stumbled across it in pursuit of some other scrap of knowledge.

Change Your Story, Change Your Life is Tolan’s primer for using the power of mind/intention/imagination to write your own story. She espouses something she calls the Story Principle that holds we are each the Author of our own life and can write it how we choose. The idea is to script the ordinary and the profound events into a narrative that works for you. Too often, in fact most of the time, she writes, we blindly accept the conventional wisdom we are handed and the way things have always been since we were old enough to notice. But these stories may not serve us at all and typically lead to missed opportunities, failure, depression and fear. By consciously writing our own narrative, we tell the story that should happen and life aligns itself with our plot.

Tolan’s research is deep and wide. She has read Eastern mysticism, Western philosophy and psychology, spiritual classics from all cultures, and scientific journals on the workings of the mind and on quantum physics. She’s bright enough to pull it all into a coherent argument for listening to the small, still voice within and taking action in our own best interests, not out of habit. She writes explanatory chapters followed by exercises to give readers the visceral experience of trying the storytelling practice and having it work. You may recognize experiences of your own in the examples she provides.

“A butterfly is not a caterpillar with wings” is one fabulous remark in the section on ways to view death and what happens next. Tolan compares the process of letting go of physical life to the formation of a chrysalis from which an entirely new and transcendent creature emerges. It’s a sensible and beautiful way to confront the social stigma of death and move past the fears into curiosity and empowerment. She discusses the need for a suspension of disbelief—skepticism being the norm in our world when it comes to the numinous and miraculous. Her view is that miracles are just the triumph of belief and practice over negative thoughts and their consequences.

Change Your Story… is not a Pollyanna prescription for avoiding harsh reality. It’s a seminal shift in POV that can determine our mundane and magnificent moments. I think, if you believe in the essential power of story and you create your own, you narrate a world and a role in it that can mirror your deepest desires and allow you to live them. Several years ago, I printed out the phrase Stories are Healing, a perfectly balanced assertion (s t o r i e s | h e a l i n g– both seven letters, easy to set in type) and taped it to my computer to counter existential despair.  So I’m already on board with the basic premise. Really, how does it make sense to consign a conscious life to a hamster wheel, followed by oblivion? For those who don’t mind reading on .pdf, you can access the whole book for free at http://www.storyhealer.com/story_healer_full.pdf.

Tolan’s Story Principle is logical and, in both small and substantial ways, it delivers. Try telling yourself you will find a parking space easily at a crowded mall, or that the train you need will arrive just as you reach the platform. Bingo. Life just got simpler. Try it with bigger and bigger things to prove to yourself that it works. Add some practices to still your monkey mind, like meditation or quiet walks in nature, tune into your own intuition, begin to study the volumes of science and spiritual wisdom she suggests and you can become a powerful bard with a life you choose—electrifying page-turner or peaceful journey.  Think about it. This could be the only New Year’s resolution you need–tell your own story, invent a beautiful life.     

Change Your Story, Change Your Life   | Stephanie S. Tolan  2009

Creating Sacred Space with Feng Shui – Karen Kingston

Click to buy from Amazon

The nice thing about reading whatever I like every day is – reading whatever I like. The tough thing is finding time in a crazy-crowded schedule to read for hours and then blog about it. So, occasionally, I read what I am living and use the overlap to facilitate some pressing activity.

Creating Sacred Space with Feng Shui by Karen Kingston is the perfect book to read when you are in the middle of a massive clear-out of an apartment you have lived in for more than 17 years. This space, with its seasonal mice, #$%^&* noisy neighbors, backyard barbecue smoke—eeuw, smells like we live over a cheap restaurant—has a fabulous Central Park West location, alas. Plus, it’s rent stabilized, a bonus that effectively traps you with the neighbors, the vermin, etc. etc. due to below-market rent. Salvation Army is getting a lot of pristine homeschooling materials and quality toddler toys as I dig into closets and empty boxes.

I am reading a John Pawson book (a cook book, actually) for inspiration in streamlining our culinary collection. Dumping a ton of old writing and marketing papers, music CDs, DVDs, various handmade souvenir baskets, pottery, folk paintings and furniture. It is a painful and horrible exercise but we are rediscovering square footage and closet space we had forgotten we had. Kingston’s prescriptions promise room for all kinds of good things to happen so I’m buying into it. Clear your clutter; change your life.

Clutter, or just seldom-used stuff, causes energy to stagnate, according to Kingston. This is a classic Feng Shui concept and the remedy is to make space to get the energy moving again. In the past, when I did a modest clear-out, I immediately got a lot of new business. So, a major release should effectively upend the economic mudslide that has buried our small enterprise and restore some fiscal sunshine. One hopes. In any case, the Karen Kingston advice is coupled with her original version of space clearing—a process and ritual that cleans the energy in a structure and banishes negative influences and the remnants of old events. Books get a special mention in Clearing Sacred Space—pretty helpful when you are staring in dismay at 14-foot-high walls of books that need dusting, sorting and selling to the used bookstore. We will always have books but we will also have eBooks and this place doesn’t need to be a set piece from Fahrenheit 451 to honor our love of the printed volume.

If you have a recurring problem in any area of your life, Kingston suggests you lay the Feng Shui bagua map over your space and find the area that relates to the problem: career, family, romance, health, wealth, etc. Check the area for clutter, items that are no longer used or were always unloved, furniture with sharp edges, even spider plants. Too many downward-hanging items encourage low energy and depression. Spiders droop attractively and produce lots of baby plants which increase the downward energy. So the recommendation is to use uplighting, ferns or other greenery that grows up, pots and cups on shelves rather than suspended from hooks. Peace lilies and dwarf bananas are good for cleaning the air and grow nicely upward.

Not every idea will work in a space-challenged apartment but the more you are aware of the message of your surroundings, the faster you can change the vibe. And, if you have a missing area, there are Feng Shui “cures” listed for tackling the imbalance. The wealth area is missing from our apartment—aaaargh. Remedies might be to hang a rainbow crystal in the window overlooking the missing area or position a mirror to reflect light there. I’ve already strung two rows of Tibetan prayer flags along the railing inscribing the phantom wealth area and we have a wind chime there but it clearly needs a bigger boost of positive. A severe paper edit—business and marketing papers, drafts of documents, bills and banking paperwork in a cabinet–and maybe a crystal might help. But the space clearing when this huge project is finished could be just the auspicious touch we need.

Space clearing is a ritual that unsticks the energy, releases old, negative vibrations and purifies the surroundings. Kingston pioneered the practice using her own talent for sensing energy and years of study with Feng Shui, meditation and indigenous shamanic practitioners. She recommends using a trained professional for the work but tells you how to do it yourself if there is no one else available. Whether you believe in the ability to affect energy fields or not, using fresh flowers, clapping, bell ringing, candles, smudging and intention to clear the space is a pleasant completion of the weeding out. There are many books about Feng Shui and a fair few about space clearing. But Creating Sacred Space with Feng Shui merges both methods in a simple set of directions and explanations that make sense and could motivate you to push through the messy clean-up part to the celebration of better energy flow when you are through.   

Creating Sacred Space With Feng Shui: Learn the Art of Space Clearing and Bring New Energy into Your Life    Karen Kingston | Broadway Books  1997

The Art of Possibility — Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander

Click to buy from Amazon

Ben Zander is an exuberant orchestra conductor and teacher whose infectious energy and positive approach inspire his young students and musicians and their audiences. A video of his youth orchestra’s tour of Latin America was a favorite in our house for years. Rosamund Stone Zander is an executive coach and family therapist. The two of them pooled resources to create a primer for living a positive life—a life that proceeds on an upward track, not a downward spiral.

The Art of Possibility is clear, pragmatic and optimistic. It is stuffed with examples of how a shift of mind, a slant view of events, can change the direction of a life and the experience of every incident. The examples illustrate ten practices for transforming any occurrence or pattern. It’s really good. This is no self-help-for-the-couch-potato tome. The Zanders begin with the assumption that the life we regard as inevitable and immovable is, in fact, entirely an invention. The way we see, the way we feel, the memories deeply buried that inform our vision—those are the parameters of the invention. When we wave them away like so much mist, we might glimpse a new possibility and a path to reach a completely different destination.

Music is the metaphor for many of the suggestions of how to see differently, act differently and welcome positive change. Ben Zander hopped on a plane on a morning when Mstislav Rostropovich had ten minutes for a telephone appeal to appear in an upcoming benefit concert. Zander knew that the chance for agreement was less than slim but the famous cellist’s appearance was important to him. He showed up in person for his appointed “phone call,” to the executive assistant’s dismay. The musicians greeted each other warmly and sat down to a discussion of the composer Zander wanted Slava to play. He left with an enthusiastic promise and wound up with a stellar concert with a surprise attendance by the composer and rave reviews. Win-win-win from an initial “no.”

This is the ninth practice, Lighting a Spark. The idea is not to strong-arm, seduce or guilt someone into agreeing with you. It is to search for the spark of passion about a subject and introduce with it the glimmer of possibility. Rostropovich was booked solid years into the future. He had only time for a brief rehearsal and a plane to catch immediately after the concert. The music was challenging and the orchestra was young. No matter. Passion won the day—Zander presented the possibility that it could work and mutual desire made it happen.

Giving an A is the third practice. Rather than setting up situations for people to prove themselves—a class with grades at the end, for instance—both Zanders counsel to give everyone an “A” at the outset. Then challenge them to write, as if the event or semester is over, how they earned that “A.” This frees each individual to examine their performance and goals in advance, set parameters for “A” behavior and outcomes, and meet the challenge from an internally imposed discipline. You are no longer being judged and found wanting at your job, or in competition with your peers for a place on the grading curve. You are engaged in succeeding at the work which is consuming your attention and time. And you can use your experience, intelligence and imagination to find unique ways to fulfill that challenge. You own the work and your success so it becomes a launching pad for future efforts and experiences.

The book is high-energy talk and inventive solutions. Most of it is an “aha” moment kind of a read—a why-didn’t-I-ever-think-of-that-but-I’m-glad-they-did experience that offers a wealth of ideas for creating positive transformation in your own life. The Zanders are literate, lively and unafraid to expose their own learning process. Very instructive are the initial failures that, after close examination and a shift in perspective, turn into triumphs. It’s a great collection of exercises for launching a new year with infinite possibilities for success. And Ben Zander loves Mahler—one of my favorite classical composers. So I was open from the beginning to accepting the brilliance of the theories in the book and I wasn’t disappointed.  

The Art of Possibility: Transforming Professional and Personal Life   Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander | Penguin Books  2002