For instance, he tells you to "just keep telling yourself your painful story until you get bored with it" and then doesn't tell you what to do if you don't get bored with it... if it's still just as painful every time you think about it. Granted, that's what therapy is for and he DOES have a disclaimer to discuss this with your healthcare or mental health provider... but if I'm going to do that, why do I need your book, Purkiss? I shouldn't fight against the huge waves, as they would always be stronger than me and push me under. I should just collaborate with them. I liked the ideas in this book, even if it had a lot of "And I learnt this from an esteemed Indian spiritual guide" going on. The exercises could have been fleshed out more with concrete examples. One of the exercises I found useful was the one about thinking what about a goal you want to achieve:

Let go of your need to control everything. You can't control everything that happens in life, so don't try. Let go and trust that things will work out the way they are supposed to. people who accept themselves as they are do not feel the need to hide qualities which some people may not like. It's very hard to stop thinking. It's better to give your mind something to do. Sit and relax, and bring your attention to your breath. All these reasons why it can't happen are incompletions /pain patterns. Do the completion exercise, identity the incident when each pain pattern started. What happened? Write it down. Relive each incident at least 5 times. Allow everything that makes you powerless to come to the surface and leave your system. If you want to appeal strongly to some people, you have to be prepared to scare some other people off.This was a fast easy read and is a positive way to frame up opportunity for us be happier and more successful taking away stuff that detracts from where we are going. These ten ideas are from notes found while reading about the book … His teachings around mindfulness are generally oversimplified and cover only a subset of known mindfulness techniques used in buddhist practices and in mindfulness psychology. The former he seems to not really like even though he reuses the classical anchor meditation in different versions in his exercises (selling each as different or not understanding the common denominator). The latter he obviously has no clue about. He seems to be largely into a very spiritual and traditional hinduism Vedic practice and transcendental meditation. His explanations for why those practices and classic meditation techniques work are largely useless and oversimplified. us being only consciousness. no we are not. just as we are not only mind and body. this things work in a triad - taking away at least one of this elements, we cannot be considered as humans at all. person can go all consciousness and mind, but what will happen to the body? or if one neglects consciousness, all the work with mind and body will be useless. and in neglecting mind - ultimately, what that person will be good for? nothing. balance between everything is a key, you cannot just throw away one element and expect everything will be all right. we manifest our beliefs, not our desires. Once you are complete, your beliefs and desires become one. Then your desires start to become reality. Written in a conversational tone, it was like a fireside chat with Mr Purkiss. He wrote mainly from his own life experiences and also from some friends who were happy to share their journey with him. I found a lot of simple truths in what he shared but the doing is so much harder because most of us are messed up inside ...but we can try, why not ?

there are many reasons why people could disagree with you and still be rational : their values might be different from yours, you and they could have different assumptions,they might have had a different experience to you, they might have information that you don't have or that you have chosen to ignore.Analyze these reasons - usually they'll be irrational beliefs like "I'm not good at xxx", "If I couldn't do it before, why would I be able to do it now", etc. we can divide desires into 3 categories :those come from ego, borrowed desires( part of our social and cultural conditioning), those arise naturally.

Let go of your need to be right. It's okay to be wrong sometimes. In fact, it's often a good thing. Let go of your need to be right and be open to learning new things.Think about the source of these beliefs - they probably started with an instance/experience when you were younger where you were bad at xxx or when you failed at doing something. Before reading it, I suspected it to be a simple introduction to mindfulness techniques, but it is very simple at that and even worse: it consists of a mixture of misleading pop psychology ideas (amongst others relying on Katie Byron whose work I personally don't resonate at all with) with some useful and reasonable experiences around mindfulness meditation. But even his description of meditation is connected with overly exaggerated effects such as "no thoughts" - even buddhist monks still have thoughts most of the time ;) and in all his examples, he only ended up with at most a few minutes without thoughts. I also didn't understand why one even should chase that experience so desperately?