Gabrielle Bernstein

Wonderfully insightful. This is my first book by Gabrielle Bernstein and won't be my last. She is like a breath of fresh air in the self-help genre. Her honesty and down-to-earth personality are very attractive and relatable. She provides humor and personal experience as motivators to the reader to empower herself. The 40-days was a do-able reading assignment with "homework" for each day. It further demonstrates her lesson of learning which is that it takes time to master. I have already show more recommended this book to friends. I purchased this book before I noticed it being reviewed at NetGalley. I felt compelled to add my opinion since I found the book extremely helpful. show less

A longtime fan of the author, I was thrilled to see this book in the Vine program. I love Gabby's upbeat, positive, yet no-nonsense and very realistic voice. She tells it like it is, breaking down her lessons, and her life, into small meaningful chapters which pull the reader in and carry him or her through to the lesson and the meaning. This book isn't the "pollyanna think and you'll be happy" refrain that some authors offer. Instead, Gabby brings you into the harsh light of day, giving show more real life examples to the lessons, and honestly, and sometimes painfully sharing aspect of her life which a lesser person might have kept hidden.

Gabby is an inspiration to all of us spirit junkies out there, the meaning to keep trying and carry on, yet she challenges the reader to change, to look at her life in a new way, and in the end, Spirit Junkie will take the reader on a journey of introspection, transformation, and love. show less

Call me a skeptic, or maybe I'm just too old to be part of Gabby's target audience. In her 5th book, Bernstein is back at it calling on her "Spirit Junkies" to say "yes" to the love of the Universe, stop living a life of fear, and open themselves to love, miracles, and abundance.

Some of Bernstein's advice is sound. She advocates meditation (which science is even proving to have health benefits), cultivating an attitude of compassion, and aiming to have a positive attitude. I start to raise show more my eyebrows when the book implies that good things don't happen to a person (or bad things do happen to a person) because their vibe is "blocking positive energy" or some other silly nonsense like that. I don't know why bad things happen to good people, but I'm darn sure than in most cases it isn't their fault.

I've read a few of Gabby's books before, and there's not much here that's new. Her tribe will love it, but I've recognized that while I was once on the periphery of that tribe, it's time for us to wish each other well and part ways. Namaste.

Thank you to NetGalley and Hay House for a galley of this book in exchange for an honest review. show less

Yeah, just the initial sense I get is: what I didn’t get, reading this book before is, it’s not just “making yourself agreeable” and duty and all that sort of thing, the way we’re basically all trained to make ourselves agreeable by Christians; the phrase comes from Dale Carnegie’s famous book, where the one lady, (unbeknownst to Dale, because it was Such A Subtle Takedown, right?) said that the little boy shouldn’t think that the Great Man ‘really cared’ about boats or show more whatever he had talked with the kid about, ‘he was just making himself agreeable.’ (Translation: Frank Capra be damned, (*pace* that movie, I mean), ‘you STILL don’t have worth, Even If you have “friends”, you little rugrat!’…. ~And ironically, that’s the idea that Make Yourself Agreeable Faith, Church Faith, in the form that subtly anti-leftist takedown memoir, “The Hiding Place”, subtly took down, right, (such a burden, Christian trad anti-capitalism, right…. {chokes on tea} You go to work because you think it makes a difference to God whether the electricity stays on? But what about Jesus? ~What about him, honey bunches of oats?…. What is it about this character that proves I can never respect myself?)…. Like: I don’t know, the church folk always has such subtle takedowns for people who try to obey them…. Or rather: for people who try to obey them, AND, be moral: Can’t Have It Both Ways, Just Be Afraid And Obey (TM)….

But yeah: that might seem like a lot of grief for the Nazarene/the World, (for all of the different religious opinions I’ve held, including a number of years of liberal Christianity, I don’t know if I have EVER, TRULY separated the two ideas, right?), but yeah…. Just the idea, going in, that what I missed in this before was THE IDEA OF AGENCY. You want to feel good and be happy and do what you set out to do and go where you set out to go: because that’s what you came here to do, so why fail by default by not trying, and end up having to waste your time and be forced to try again, to do what you wanted to do, right? HAVE AGENCY.

And the idea that it starts with her having a breakdown in a yoga class: which is almost the point of practice, in a weird way: it’s not all about avoiding the pain we habitually associate with guilt, right…. You put pressure on yourself, as much as you want to not needlessly strain your powers: but you put pressure on yourself with your practice, almost So That, at the mysterious time, You Will break down—that is the mystery, because it is THAT different from, ‘pain = guilt’, right? (The obsession with Hell, right?) Because basically that is The way, to, ‘build back better’, you know. (And I am NOT saying that Joseph Biden successfully ended tyranny in America, lol-omfg…. But it’s a cute phrase: a good one.)….

Putting pressure on yourself—as much as you want to do with with respect to yourself—is precisely because ~~~the messiness of life~~~ is an, integral, part of practice: and NOT because, ‘pain = guilt; avoid pain, avoid life’, right…. Putting pressure on yourself comes from the OPPOSITE idea: that the crops grow out of dung-fertilized soil, right….

And you know what else is messy? Indeed, it seems, dishonest, illegitimate…. Or at least, risky, and for the sake of paltryness, pettiness. And yet, without it, we become ALL of those things, not least, petty:

LOVE.

…. (Intro—Gabby’s experience) (nods) Meditation is a Way of Wisdom, in addition to all the other things it is. I first really got that from reading that famous meditation book from the 70s—it doesn’t really matter what it was called, although the title was simple enough—although obviously people figured that out many times before, and many times since, right. Quiet Mind; Wise Mind, right….

And one of the wisest things you can realize is, that you DO want to be happy, after all!…. I hate to whale (spelling?) on the Christians, but: although the great majority of ‘scribal errors’ or whatever are trivial—in 99% of cases it’s over-fastidious even to report them, in a non-scholarly edition; they’re so trivial—but there are rare exceptions: and in the NT there’s a verse, I can’t figure out the exact context, but I did read that some scribes put it down that Jesus showed up, INSTEAD OF, the joy that was set before him, and others that he showed up, BECAUSE OF, the joy that was set before him, right. It’s like: that’s something you might want to clear up, right. Did Jesus just show up to work on a Saturday, because of that boss from “Office Space” (1999)?…. Like, figure this out, homies, a’ight?

Again; I apologize for whaling on the Nazarenes; it’s just that this is my personal history.

But yeah: surrender/love vs fear/resistance…. And yeah: do you really want to be happy, or not, right?….

What role does happiness play in your ideology, right. Is it positive? It is…. Embarrassing?

The smallest words, right. The simplest questions.

…. “(When we feel separate from joy, it comes from:) in some way or another, we deny the love of the Universe and choose the fear of the world.”

It’s interesting how classically ACIM that line is, and yet I find I connect to Gabby’s books better than I do to the ACIM text, because the latter seems abstract to the point almost of being inhumane, so different than Gabby’s stories of being young and a rather overly lax spiritual seeker, before she reached maturity. (My own story was so different. I was so “young” for so long—kinda that “useless male romanticism” that—to make one of those ridiculous “every woman” sentences, that “every woman has a deep, settled contempt for, deep in her bones”, rotfl 😹…. Even before I had even burned off all of that karma, or even started to, really: in my head, I had turned on a dime, and was now the over-serious and rather withdrawn studious type with an intellectual commitment not to be arrogant and over-serious, that didn’t really amount to much, right….)…. But yeah: I feel like a lot of people reject “this kind of book” because they read it that the “miracles” can’t be political miracles, right: and it would it better if there were books more like that—although I have to admit that the problem is in me, because there ARE some ‘spiritual politics’ books, and I haven’t read them: or done much more with activism than put it on my list of things to do…. But yeah: I don’t know…. Just to peel away at the onions and find a story about a drug addict in what looked like the Bible of the Midcentury Philosophers, right—kinda makes me think that there are indeed more layers to the onion than are obvious and apparent…. As obvious as it is, that it would be beyond easy to use the ACIM to increase alienation, right: say, your friend is reading about the Gypsy (Roma) people and their magic: and you, you have a book, that’s a little bit more proper, when it comes to magic…. ~But yeah : in my experience, whatever can work good, can work evil. Antibiotics and medicines or whatever can be prescribed improperly and cause harm…. And science can be used by society almost primarily to underwrite classism, right: right, like, some textbooks, most textbooks, in pretty much most academic fields, exist mostly to underwrite classism. To actually talk about the subject at hand and what it means to the heart and to life would be too embarrassing, not ‘elite’ enough, not isolated enough…. Ultimately, not limited enough!…. As strange as that sounds…. We grow used to living in a world of limitation, in just the same way as we grow used to limiting each other, right….

…. I’ll save you the block text of qualifications—basically: the Christian population as a whole has in no sense made the world a better place—but yeah, the Prayer of Saint Francis is fascinating. (Another channeled text, as well: and I do think that makes it no less authentic than anything else…. It’s almost better: the guy had 700 years in Spirit to distill his teaching into a single prose poem, right?….). I do want to learn more about mantras and Sanskrit and languages and chants and stuff too. (That was the first thing Gabby ever came across, spiritually, was mantra work.) But yeah, re: the Francis Prayer…. It’s amazing how it works basically equally well to thinkers of his own time and ours, generally speaking: it’s a shadow wonder how many thinkers, seeking “to understand”, are actually only interesting in “being understood”: only dominating through thought, and never truly serving. “Grant that I may seek to understand, rather than to be understood”. Classic spirituality.

…. Yeah, when you’re in a place where it’s not working for you, basically:

1. Acknowledge where you are: really feel your experience; and then, when you’re ready—
2. Make a choice for something new.

Gabby like most people have a collection of both masculine and feminine personality aspects—at one time in her life, she did actually relate to relaxed, semi-delinquent males, rather than girls in girls’ clubs, right—but perhaps it is the more classically feminine part of her that shows itself in, (aside: people are trained to see the feminine aspects of women, and the masculine aspects of men, right…. Which isn’t to deny that there are probably Are, bound to be Some, perhaps, masculine constellations of traits in men’s bodies people, and feminine ones in women’s body people: and of course, some people Are more uniformly gendered, than others), in that aspect which seems to go throughout her work: that ~happiness~, love, whatever you want to call it: ~~is indeed~~ a topic in “morality”, right: something that implicitly many moralists deny with great vigor, you know….

…. “The miracle isn’t how well we avoid fear; the miracle is how quickly we return to love.” I saw a ACIM video the other day, where the girl described ACIM as “universal” and “for everyone”, and I didn’t hear her make an exception for witches or twitchy, witchy men, so…. Yeah: it’s not about avoiding…. Disorder, irregularity…. It’s about being able to come back, when the rest of life resumes, you know. Otherwise, what gift do you have for Life, if you have no Order? Is not your gift your craft, carefully learnt and practiced?…. But we do not live in a prison, you know. People can make anything into a prison; Andre Agassi talks about going to a tennis camp as a teen that was like a prison, and people read it and are amused by his diction, care nothing for what he felt, and imagine that they ‘like’ him, right?

But yeah, plenty of disruption and chaos isn’t as pleasant as games and tennis, right. But it is delusive to imagine that you are always serene, living on the earth. Animals themselves feel pain and dysphoria. But no healthy animal—even animals can become traumatized, although I think it is less common among them than us—sits around growling or groveling because of the events of four years ago, right. Or, in ordinary situations, seven minutes ago, right.

…. It’s funny how we experience what is more properly conceived of as the Holy Instant, as a moment of guilt. Our socialization triggers our shame, at the moment when properly speaking, Freedom is available…. I was reading a dual-language edition of Sappho before: [‘Masculine Sappho’, who writes poems about roses, of course…. Yeah: the proof that Greco-British education, is, a-okay….lol], not that I know Greek—but in the notes, which I did read, unlike the funny letters, lol: it discussed how Sappho’s word which can be glossed as shame, (“shame prevents me”—although it’s hard to know how she ~experienced~ that, right?), can be understood to mean something more like honor, self-worth, that sort of thing. Whereas in our current socialization, shame is generally understood to mean the acknowledgment that one has not (cannot ever have, even) those things—honor, self-worth…. Chosen agenda, almost…. Words are riddles, to be sure: though, *pace* Tolkien, you should not play word-riddle games with the majoritarian: ie, the mentally ill, lol. [ie, Gollum. 👌].

…. “Your purpose is to learn through love.” Set an intention.

…. “To learn through the perception of love, or to learn through the perception of fear” ~Actually most people do neither: a ‘once-born’ person, to define that term I love to lift from the Avalon book, is basically someone who hasn’t learned, and isn’t learning. It is ~possible~ to learn through fear: it’s less of a total loss, so to speak, than just deferring learning entirely, but it leads to a very imperfect, flawed, partial process: lots of angsty liberal Christian stuff, tied in knots, Rachel Held Evans-ing, that sort of thing. I didn’t read every work of RHE’s relatively small body of work from her relatively short life, you know: and I’m obviously not an expert on the state of other people’s souls (unlike the Big Name Oppressor Brains of the History of Christian Theory, lol—for extra credit, write about how it interacted with the actual physical-social world, as opposed to the World of Forms for Dummies, lol 😂), but I wouldn’t be surprised if Rachel…. I don’t know; I don’t think she ever found peace, or ever came to terms with the decisions she made in her life, the ‘decisions’ she made, in the context of living in an, insoluble moral puzzle, it seemed like she took the world to be, right, on some level, in which we are not free to choose (good Republican upbringing, ironically!), but are fully responsible for making the choices we don’t like, on some level loathe making, and on some level, reproach ourselves for making…. Yeah, learning through fear tends to involve, not really coming to terms with our own choices, which I guess is the ‘necessary corollary’, of not being free, right….

I guess if you don’t know “what love is”, so to speak, and you don’t feel entitled to learn through love, basically; then, I don’t know: you’ll go by some bloody winding way, you know—although you shouldn’t sit down in the mud and die, necessarily, right…. I can’t explain it…. But yeah: the truer learning, is through love. Schools and “learning” are of course very hierarchical; the truer learning, is through love.

…. I think that we should feel our pain when it comes up, not because pain “has a meaning” or “doesn’t have a meaning”—both of which can be very misleading—but because it is ~our~ pain: our ~Feelings~—and ultimately all feelings are one: it’s all sorrow, and it’s all joy.

But she’s right to imply as she does that saying that “pain has meaning”, very often has the actual effect of deafening most feelings ~except for~ some form of pain, right.

I also think (she implies this too, at one point), that we shouldn’t do semi-formal practice, when we have too much pain. Regular formal practice every day during free time; informal/semi-formal daily moments sorta managing mental time and space during ordinary tasks: but when there’s ‘too much’ pain, the pain should simply be to wait upon the pain, until it comes round again to the peace and joy which go together, right.

…. Sometimes openly to love, practicing openness with love, is more important than rigid obedience to a schedule.

…. (paraphrases) Set intentions and goals with a sense of joy, curiosity, and lightness.

Negative events that take place are a reflection of your co-creating things that reflect your own (I might suggest that they’re ‘caught’ ideas) sense of what is true about you, (even if it isn’t); witness the process of your life, including the painful events, with love, (rather than feeling a sense of heaviness, punishment, and guilt).

~I riffed off parts of this, but I do think she embodies many of these energetic concepts ‘better’ than I currently do, (love-philosophy, basically)—not that it’s a competition.

…. ~winding up the re-review:

The last chapter is kinda cute, I guess, if notably weak, in what gets left unsaid, even in at least some of the anecdotes and such. Still, a decade is a long time—like Paul McCartney in some concert from the 70s, slyly referred to the 60s as, a time long ago, or whatever, however he said it…. Only opposite: not so much Camelot being remembered: as the time before the Dragon Arising Wars, right…. Like, fucking Time magazine, even, right, (Eckhart Tolle is “mumbo-jumbo” but), fucking Donald Trump is Man of These Times, each and every time he gets elected, right…. Like, we’re the liberal media, but act now, and we’ll sell you sexism and racism, for 19.99, (plus tax)…. “Plus tax! They’re siding with the gobbermint! They’re the fascists of the liberal conspiracy!”….

But, anyway: I got sidetracked…. Oh, it was only as far back as 2016; I could have sworn it was 2013…. But yeah: in 2016 we still thought that the Dragon Wars were going to be a quick mop-up operation…. Really, even as late as 2016, MANY more delusive things were written about politics than she writes…. And, I mean, as superficially as many vanilla new agers write about politics, MANY things, especially if we open it up beyond just ~~written, non-fiction~~ sources, do indeed weave whole webs in the mind, without once ever thinking to Ever, explicitly and especially non-hysterical-rightist-ly, address politics and the non-personal/individual aspects of life, right….

And yeah: if you put aside the weak points that crop up now and again—and indeed, some of the stronger points in the book are picking up on moments of weakness and non-goodness/non-love, non-respect, right, and turning THAT sort of thing, into a teaching story, right….

~Yeah: I always knew that ACIM was about God and realization and stuff: but I guess, I never realized it was about, love, really.

And love ain’t just knowing more about shit, than somebody else. True talk, son. show less