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Summary: IN COMPARISON
Comment: NOT NEARLY AS GOOD AS 'SWEAT YOUR PRAYERS'. NONETHELESS, THIS IS STILL WORTH READING AND FOR THE UNINITIATED WILL LEND SOME INSIGHT.
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Summary: Essential maps for those who dare trek the terrain of the soul
Comment: I loved reading Roth's Sweat Your Prayers and Connections. I've danced like a wild woman to her music. Now I find Maps to Ecstasy to be filled with guidance for my inner journey and how to live my everyday life in the world. I'm ordering two copies for Christmas presents. For my daughter-in-law, who is a young mother, I want to share how Roth understands and honors motherhood with rare honesty. For my massage therapist daughter-in-law, I want to share Roth's perspective (and background) of massage as a spiritual art. If they only read those chapters, Roth will have touched their lives in very profound ways. This book is full of treasures for all who intentionally journey within.
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Summary: Finding Rhythm for Healing
Comment: Having read her first book, I was interested as to where the second book would take this. In this book, Ms. Roth extends her Five Rhythms to be included as part of everyday life.This is a natural progression, and Ms. Roth draws parallels to include similar patterns. She discusses the Cycles of Life - Birth, Childhood, Puberty, Maturity and the Death, in which we can see these rhythms and the progressions. Life does indeed have a rhythm to it and she sees these as the "dance of life in five movements". The final step to this dance is healing, a bringing about of the oneness of ones self. This is done by embodying the spirit through the five levels of consciousness: inertia, inspiration, imitation, intuition and imagination. This is her path to ecstasy. She finds dance and life has a map we can follow and find the spiritual ecstasy we all seek in our lives.
Her method of writing, incorporating her own personal life rhythms and experiences and her insightful observations make this book a wonderful and easy read. We can always learn from other people's experiences and Ms. Roth weaves this well. Her days working at Esalan enabled Ms. Roth to put together her then acquired skills, tune them, put them into practical use and give us the final product here in this book.
She shows how these rhythms are present in each persons life and can be applied to our personal self healing, attunement, stress relief, personal relationships and general health and well being.
I enjoyed this book and found Ms. Roth's insightful self-questioning and personal exploration a path that can be incorporated into each person's life, as a whole or with partial application. It definitely left me thinking upon things I have since considered and seek to explore further.
Both books here are complimented by her music and she also has an instructional video "The Wave" as a visual aid to her work. You need not have magic dancing toes or be a rhythmic person to apply any of this. All you need is the ability to move.
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Summary: Healing Artist
Comment: Gabrielle Roth's book defies being categorized. I took one of her workshops years ago and was stunned at how well she got us to the heart of things. In her writing, as in person, she stands in stark contrast to most "self-help gurus" out there: She seems to have chosen consciously to speak her truth rather than "expertize" herself. By doing that, she embodies the message that the rewards to which she wants to lead her readers (ecstasy) is a human birthright. That stance is admirable when compared with those who suggest implicitly or explicitly that their degrees, years of accredited study, association with high-prestige teachers, and other marks of status somehow qualify them to lay out for others a path towards "self-improvement."
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Summary: Wonderful and inspiring!
Comment: "This is a wonderful and inspiring book that can lead people to a new level of understanding and give them the courage to follow thier dreams." - Lynn Andrews, author, - "Medicine Woman"
