schinko94's reviews
107 reviews

This book would be good if there wasn't so much bunk theorizing about "source energy" and "high/low frequency people." I think the general concepts are good: You should avoid making excuses that keep you from doing what you want, you should meditate, you should say affirmations. However, you can do those things without including nonsense about metaphysics. I suspect that Jen Sincero actually knows this too--She just chose to use this sort of self-help language as the modus operandi for the book.

Take the red pill and read this book

This text, straight from the mouth of Bhairava himself, is the fundamental basis of Kashmiri Shaivism and meditation. The techniques are excellent, and are a much faster way of acquiring jivan mukti than some other forms of meditation. Very short and definitely worth a read.

Okay so... I'm not going to lie, this book is mind-blowing. It puts into words everything that I've experienced in my personal meditation practice, and now I have a framework in which to view meditation and mindfulness.

In fact, just about every paragraph in this book is highly intentional and startlingly clear. I was gaining new understanding with each sentence, and I think that that is the spirit of Tantra itself. The act of understanding one's true nature is indeed the full manifestation of the goddess Kali herself, and is vital to understanding how this life works.

I am not planning on converting to Hinduism any time soon, but I don't need to, because the religion of each individual is still a (very specific) manifestation of the divine goddess. Tantra is the essence of all, and all is the essence of Tantra. The two are interchangeable and cannot be separated.

This book is great for those people who are just beginning their workout journey. I have known about HIIT workouts for years, and I have consistently been surprised by their results. I am not "ripped," nor do I have a six-pack, but I do notice results every time that I train in intervals.

The only criticism that I have of this book is the science that pertains to psychological attitudes towards HIIT workouts. The author cites a study by one of his own grad students, which is, to say the least, the easy way out. The fact is, HIIT workouts are hard, and are (in my opinion) not sustainable over the course of an entire lifetime. I would like to see more studies about long-term attitudes towards HIIT workouts in order to corroborate the findings of the studies that the author lists. In my personal experience, I only have used them in order to lose weight initially, and also to break fitness plateaus.

That being said, this book is a good primer for those who want to know how to structure interval workouts, and the author gives several examples of what the workouts look like. Would recommend to anyone who is feeling lost in the fitness world and wants to try something that may be new to them.

Good food for thought, even if I don't necessarily agree with everything the author says about white working class racism. Does a good job of demonstrating that the rise of white grievance in recent years is much more complicated than "white trash people mostly vote republican, don't be white trash."

(Really 2.5 stars)

People either seem to really like this book or think that it's disappointing, and unfortunately I fall into the latter camp. I haven't read Sapiens, but now I'm not sure if I want to.

One of the major failings of this book is that Harari tries to turn a behemoth of individual (and seemingly unrelated) historical facts into a cohesive vision of the future of humanity. I'm not even sure that the best of historians could accomplish this, let alone an author who has some grandiose ideas of how humans will interact with technology in the future. I just think that the extremely "macro" view of history that Harari attempts to present in this book is too much to chew on, and he would be better off refining this book into a narrower selection of historical subject matter.

The "bureaucratic narratives vs. reality" argument that he presents is also interesting, but I don't know if I buy it. Harari tries to say that human reality ultimately bends to the will of fictional stories told by bureaucrats, which is true, but only to a point. He then presents the division of Africa as evidence of this argument, but I don't think he does it well enough. Did Africa really bend to the fictional borders of the Berlin Conference, or did reality continue to fester while Europeans told themselves that everything would be okay and that Africa would be better off because of them? I believe the latter happened, not the former.

This sort of shaky philosophical reasoning is part of the reason that I'm skeptical of the rest of the book. While I respect Harari's attempt to think things through, I don't think his version of the future will ultimately come to fruition, because there are just too many moving parts that he didn't take into account.

This isn't a bad book, but it's more of a beginner's guide as the author says in the first chapters. The techniques presented in this book are super basic, and you can glean the same insights from reading books by monks (who are, arguably, better teachers of meditation than this author).

One of the main issues I have with this book specifically is that it offers some bad advice regarding form and posture. It's important that you're comfortable during meditation, but the author claims that it isn't necessary to sit up straight or endure any discomfort during a meditative experience. I would argue the opposite, because in my meditation practice, I have found that acknowledging and enduring the discomfort associated with sitting actually causes a deeper meditative state. This is a more Buddhist approach to meditation: By acknowledging, questioning, and subsequently observing the dissolution of pain, you acquire knowledge about the transitory nature of reality. In the long term, sitting with the correct posture is ultimately beneficial for your whole being. While it is not necessarily a requirement for "good" meditation, it is certainly conducive to letting go of tension and ensuring a certain state of awareness.

Other than that, the information presented in this book is pretty generic, and it can be found in a lot of other texts. The author includes some quirky attributes of transcendental meditation in his technique (ah ham), but these are certainly not required for you to become a good meditation practitioner. I would recommend books by Jack Kornfield and the Dalai Lama if you want to learn more about vipassana, as this would be the next step for someone who wants to read books about more intermediate-to-advanced meditation techniques.

Normally I wouldn't even give a book like this the time of day, but I recalled it being quite popular when it was released, so I thought I would give it a try.

As expected, it's full of a bunch of nonsense. It gives some good practical advice (stop drinking sugar and diet soda, duh), but you absolutely do not have to eat organic or vegan or vegetarian in order to lose weight. Organic food is expensive, GMO's are not the devil, and you can find an awful lot of vegetarian food that isn't great for you either.

I get what the author was trying to go for--A no-nonsense tone, and some lofty suggestions about what qualifies as healthy eating/exercise. However, it really kind of falls flat. The tone is at times condescending, and this book is certainly not super useful for anyone who isn't a white, middle-class woman.