You Are Your Healer
The Ultimate Guide to Heal Your Past, Transform Your Life & Awaken to Your True Self
You Are Your Healer is a practical self-help book filled with exercises to help people toward self-inquiry.
Drawing on Eastern spirituality, Yol Swan’s self-help book You Are Your Healer includes worthwhile practical exercises alongside its theoretical work.
Asking how life might change if people let go of the past to be present in the moment, this book begins with an Eastern philosophy primer, a personal account of maturation, and a presentation of its own Swan Method. The latter, a program for reaching enlightenment, encourages the audience to sever their connections to destructive behaviors and attitudes. Its exercises are designed to drag a person’s consciousness out of the past and future and into the present moment. They stand to help people create a mental space wherein their attitudes and fears can be exposed and examined. They are practices of self-inquiry, presented in clear terms, that often revolve around asking the right question at the right time.
Some novel observations are made, such as the idea that life is a movie that each person directs for themselves, making choices about how they interpret the “script,” or the daily events that they cannot control. The book also suggests that people interpret the events of their lives and view them as the kind of movie they want, whether they are conscious of it or not. This idea leads into an exercise that urges people to ask, at some points in their days, “Why is this in my movie?”
The book’s language is direct and explanatory, and its work is made more accessible via the stories and illustrations that open its chapters to introduce and clarify their concepts in advance. However, too much of the book is devoted to delivering background information, despite the internal acknowledgement that “concepts alone will not take you far.” Its introductory material on the divine consciousness and the ego is repeated in the Swan Method portion of the book, and in a more succinct manner. Elsewhere, its sections about the types of physical and immaterial bodies, karma, and reincarnation take the focus off of the central self-help work. While this material is thought-provoking, much of it proves unnecessary to following the exercises and to attaining the book’s stated goals.
With a helpful glossary that defines its Eastern spiritual terms, You Are Your Healer is a theory-heavy self-help book that’s filled with exercises to help people toward self-inquiry.
Reviewed by
Matt Benzing
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
