for what you could become."
— Mahatma Gandhi
Judith Orloff is assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA. She is the author of Emotional Freedom and Positive Energy. For more than 20 years she has helped patients experience emotional freedom and the power of surrender. Now in this ambitious and bellwether volume, Orloff puts together the bits and pieces that constitute a full, rich, and meaningful life. In the process, she uses insights from neuroscience, intuitive medicine, and psychiatry to amplify her findings.
Orloff admits that she is intrigued with the idea of surrender as "a positive, intuitive way of living, a power that grows as you develop trust in the moment as well as in change and the unknown." Surrender, then, becomes a way to gain mastery in your life. It facilitates and relieves gridlock in relationships and at work. It helps attune us to the natural rhythm of things. And it is a mood maker par excellence!
Orloff ranges widely in developing this theme. She identifies 12 ways to surrender under these thematic modules:
• Power and Money
• Reading People and Communication
• Relationships, Love, and Sensuality
• Morality & Immortality: Cycles of Light
• Embracing Ecstasy
Each chapter has tools for surrender, quizzes to guide you, and how-to exercises.
Orloff admits that writing this book "has been a devotional for me, a prayer about deeply trusting the time I'm allotted and shedding my inhibitions and fears."
We especially appreciated her insights on the many ways in which surrender opens you to states of grace, the need to stop comparing ourselves to others, the importance of giving up the idea that we can control our own destinies, how to see beyond the material seduction and fear of money, how to communicate with anger addicts, making the most of the divinity of your body and sexuality, discovering the sensual essence of the natural world, dealing with the toxicity of noise, letting go through tears, and the art of surrender in physical aging.
