Crenshaw's Books & Decks

True Balance is a beautiful book to use as a first approach for beginners to the Chakra system. The chakras are seven energy points that contribute to our physical, mental, emotional and spiritual well-being.

Choquette's language is very clear, direct and chatty. Like in other of her books, she uses her own life and her customers' experiences to give examples and illustrate her points. The book has an inquisitive but playful tone, and it will certainly help you improve your life even if you don't believe in the existence of chakras. That is a lot to say.

Each Chapter is devoted to the discussion at length of each chakra: its function, the qualities it relates to, signs that the chakra is balanced, the symptoms of any imbalance (and different degrees of it). Choquette also poses the reader many questions to self-evaluate oneself and determine whether our chakra is in a good shape or not. She also gives many tips, exercises and practices to balance each individual chakras no matter its state.

The book is very practical, more energetic than spiritual, and certainly less religious than others by Choquette (the religious part is mostly devoted to the chapter on the Crown Chakra. Choquette poses many questions for thought to improve your self-knowledge and promote your physical and inner growth, and the correction of any imbalance.

The main thing your will learn is that being human is also being imperfect, that nobody but a few humans on the planet are completely balanced, and that balance is something you work on every day. Accepting our flaws without judgement, and working on your energy system will create a more fulfilling life and let us flow.

Trust your Vibes is a wonderful uplifting book more appropriate to open the channels to your intuition, so you can hear it louder and better, than to develop your intuition.

Choquette's writing is very direct, cheery and entertaining, and her personal and client's examples are very illustrative.

The book will add to your life even if you aren't an intuitive person or have any psychic interest. It is just good advice for happy living. Many of the exercises and questions for thought she poses are terrific and a good tool to develop your self-knowledge.

Choquette uses principles of the law of attraction and positive thinking in her approach to life mixed with some Eastern Philosophy teachings, but her approach is heavily religious and Christian. If you aren't religious or Christian, you might not connect with some of the things she says. At times, Choquette opposes intellect and intuition, but I find that puzzling because one can be highly intellectual and very intuitive at the same time without opposition. I agree that both things can create conflict sometimes, but I don't think that you need to erase your intellect, especially if you have it, to be a good intuitive.

I have enjoyed the book a lot, so much so that I have bought another one by her. However, I do prefer Laura Day's books on intuitive development because she offers plenty of practical exercises and advice on how to develop you intuition, does not oppose intellect and intuition at all, and is not religiously biased

The Bhagavad Gita -one of the Hindu sacred texts- is in my must-read list. You can get a cheap translation of the Gita (Kindle version for $0.99) at Amazon. Reading a spiritual text of the complexity of the Gita, as any other religious text, is always a burden on my shoulders. Sorry for the honesty. When I stumbled upon this book, I thought the cover was cheap and unappealing, naive in a way, but the title was appealing enough to download it, especially because it was, again, 0.99 cents.

I usually browse many of the "cheapies" or "freebies" I download for my Kindle searching for passages or chapters of interest, to quickly move on to more substantial readings. To my surprise, this book got me glued from beginning to end. 

Vishwanath is a former business consultant turned into New Age guru, something that would have made me run away from this book a priori. Ignorance is sometimes blissful. Thus, I was able to read the book without any prejudice, with intellectual curiosity and the detachment that any religious or spiritual book requires from me. This is not an academic exegesis of the Gita, done by a Gita expert or spiritual master (you should check Yogananda's edition for that), but a simple unpretentious book that uses the Gita in a practical way to extract practical advice to improve your life in general, no matter your religion or lack of it. In a way, is also a teacher's book to explain in simple words Hindu spiritual beliefs to non-Hindu people. 

Vishwanath is able to speak about very complex spiritual things using a very simple language. The book is full of metaphors and simple parables that will get you to understand some of the principles taught by the Gita or some obscure sayings by Krishna. You will learn about the nature of God, the age of the Universe, the Hindu heavens and reincarnation, why Hindu people need of many Gods and Godesses, and the spiritual principles that inspire Yoga among many other things. Some of the practical items of advice will help to bring peace to your mind (if you need of any), give you food for thought, and provide you with some amazing meditation exercises. I especially like the one about the Ocean, which I do sometimes and it is truly amazing.
 

It happens rarely, but, sometimes, a one-dollar investment produces a good revenue.

A very entertaining and thoughtful book. 

Jalaluddin Rumi is an Aghgan-Persian Sufi mystic and poet of the 12th century who produced, among others, the Book of Love, an amazing book of love poems.

The Book of Love is one of those books that everybody should read at least once in a lifetime. It is full of depth about the human soul, the true essence of our humanity disregarding origin, and, most importantly, about the nature of Love. 

Rumi talks about divine love, mystic love, romantic and erotic love, and friends love with candidness, cheekiness, sense of humour, and great depth.Sometimes the poems can be read in a mystic or romantic way. The poems are so fresh and modern that one wows at the fact that a Muslim mystic wrote them many centuries ago. Even if you are not into Poetry, which is my case, the poems are still easy to read, enjoyable and thought-provoking.

This edition as a preface and introductory study, and each of the fifteen groups of poems have also a little commentary to contextualise them and the theme they revolve around. I don't know Arabic, but the translation seems correct and it is easy to read.  

In alignment with the ideas and principles shown in Ruiz's The Four Agreements, the Mastery of Love approaches the basics of human relationships (romantic and non romantic) by going to the root of what love is, and how true happiness can be found and achieved.

Don Miguel Ruiz uses many metaphorical stories and fables to make his points, and, despite the simplicity of the language, he is able to convey deep and meaningful concepts. 

Some of the lessons this book teaches are:
- To have a successful relationship with anybody, no matter the type, you have to work mostly on yourself.

- If you don't truly genuinely love yourself, nobody will.
- If you don't respect yourself, nobody will. Actually, they'll abuse you.
- If you don't accept your body as it is, you are disrespecting yourself, you become insecure and an easy pray to your own and everybody else's criticism. Physical beauty is just an ever-changing idea that means nothing.
- See people for what they are, not for what they could be.
- Accept people for what they are, not for what you want them to be.
- If your partner doesn't have what you are looking for, look for another partner.
- Don't try to change the other person. People don't change that much. 
- You can't find happiness unless you are already happy inside. 

- You can't find happiness if fear rules your life.

- People vibrate at the same frequency levels and find/meet who they "are", not what they are looking for.
- Don't let your believe system (partly family inheritedy) and programming (Social/cultural conditioning) rule your life. You want to dream your own dreams, not somebody else's.
- Be true to who you are, and don't fake what you are not. The latter takes much more effort and makes your life more difficult and less fulfilled.

- Forgiveness makes you happier, as cleans out the poison in your emotional body.

- Accept that we are mind and body, and that our animal instincts are nothing to be ashamed of.

- In a couple, the only half you can control is you.

- Improvement is a a fight against your social programming, a 24/7 battle against yourself and your thoughts and emotional reactions.  

- We perceive the world with the eyes of our emotions. If they are dirty, we see a dirty world. If you see it rosy, rosy it is.

The book is very philosophical, and helps to clear up our mind when we have doubts about a date, a person with whom we are starting a relationship, or a partner/relative with whom we are having communication or relation problems. 

The book is also repetitive, ruthless and pitiless. In a way, tells us to stop with the excuses we give ourselves, do something or shut up. This is not a book for the faint hearted. Don't read it thinking that you will find a magic potion to date the hot new guy/girl on the block or sort out your family relationships. Still, it is a book worth reading, because in its few pages provides us with many useful ideas to ponder about what human connection is and can be.

Despite its title, the Mastery of Love lacks a bit of practicality regarding techniques to implement the advice given, except for some exceptions, and some final prayers, which aren't of much help if you aren't a believer. For ex. if you don't love yourself, how do learn to love yourself? f you are blind and you cannot see, how can do you open your eyes? If you have been abused since childhood, how do you learn to stop the abuse? If you are with somebody who has addictions, mental problems or anger issues, what do you do? Abandon him? Should you abandon any person with whom you don't have a fluffy initial relationship? That sort of questions. Although some of the things Ruiz mentions can be easily accepted, at least at an intellectual and spiritual level, the lack of practical techniques and exercises makes difficult for the reader to go from the intellectual/spiritual acceptance of the ideas and principles mentioned in the book, to a place where things flow naturally from the heart and you experience those feelings yourself.