The Art of Effortless Living (Paperback)

~ (Author) "Every culture seeks to provide answers to some of the fundamental questions we face in the course of a lifetime..." (more)
Key Phrases: compulsive performing, bodywork table, effortless living, New York, Effortless Practice, Audrey Hepburn (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A popular college professor who married a wealthy college beau, at 27 Bacci seemed to have it all. But her success suddenly vanished with the emergence of a nameless disease that stole her vitality and left her mysteriously incapacitated. For three years, she was treated by every doctor she could find, until she realized that healing would come only from inside herself. Leaving her marriage and career behind, Bacci embarked on a quest for self-transformation through meditation and yoga. Focusing primarily on bodywork, Bacci spends the bulk of this self-help manual teaching the "inner arts" that she asserts are not just neglected, but discouraged in our culture, "stifling the ultimate source of our sense of fulfillment." Examining a life spent doing rather than being, Bacci deftly describes addictions to fear and anxiety, which she says produce stress and its attendant ailments, from arthritis to cancer. She offers many suggestions for developing an alternative, "effortless" lifestyle, through breathing exercises, meditation and visualization, techniques for physical and emotional awareness, and connection to a higher self. Occasionally, Bacci implies that changing one's own viewpoint and behavior will magically change everyone and everything else as well. However, she skillfully presents the bodywork she's been performing with clients since the early 1980s and explains the philosophy behind it in calm, accessible prose with plenty of examples and exercises for cultivating "receptivity and non-resistance." (Sept.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

A practical, ground-breaking guide to achieving more by doing less.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: Bantam Books (June 3, 2002)
• ISBN-10: 0553814400
• ISBN-13: 978-0553814408
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 4.7 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #2,085,611 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

28 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Recommended., September 17, 2001

By	Samuel Chell (Kenosha,, WI United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Art of Effortless Living (Hardcover)

I'll admit I'm a tough audience when it comes to popular self-help books. The themes are predictable, repetitious, derivative. So the value of the text largely comes down to a question of the author's rhetoric.

Though a practitioner of the Alexander technique, Bacci is open to numerous complementary systems, most particularly those Eastern views of self that emphasize "being" over "doing," that locate success and failure in personal consciousness, not in individual performance or in the products of the Western Puritanical work ethic. Through numerous engaging examples, illustrations, explanations she manages to be an effective and inspirational "coach-teacher." While making it clear that living effortlessly requires the effort of concentration and practice, she makes the goal seem both worth while and accessible.

Besides stressing and suggesting ways of heightening personal consciousness, Professor Bacci incorporates many elements from what used to be called "transactional analysis." Once we stop trying to prove our worth through our accomplishments, we can began to approach human relationships from a more mature, less exasperating perspective. More often than not, her points strike home. And when she comes up with an occasional lame illustration, she almost invariably follows it up with a real "zinger." I can attest that I felt energized and empowered after reading some of the chapters.

While Professor Bacci's approach strikes me as a valuable counterbalance to the present-day obsession with measuring success and failure in the materialist terms of society at large, the reader may at the same time feel compelled to qualify some of her own positions as extreme. For example, focusing on what we feel in the moment can certainly lead to heightened consciousness and increased self-awareness. At the same time, happiness is as likely to be a by-product of the pursuit of a goal external to the self as the object of pursuit itself. Also, while it is true that confronting, or "being with," the experience of pain can paradoxically release constricted nerve centers in the body (here Bacci sounds a bit like an Eastern-trained massage therapist discussing "chi"), there are other situations where being pain's silent witness does not necessarily assure its removal (think of an exploding bladder or acute gastric distress).

Finally, the reader should not lose sight of the "effort" preceding Bacci's own discovery of effortless living. Sensing that being an academic and a wife forced her to live "roles" at odds with her authentic self, as manifested in crippling physical illnesses, the author simply abandoned both roles in favor of the genuine, healthy person she now is. Others may not find a change this radical either so practical or so effective as the author apparently did.

25 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This book has been like a big sister to me., September 4, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: The Art of Effortless Living (Hardcover)

Dear Reader to be: As I was reading The Art of Effortless Living, I was hoping it was true. That my life could be effortless. I have grown up struggling and striving to do right, be happy and just get through the daily requirements of life. Every page offered me new perspective as well as encouragement and suggested actions to move away from striving and toward what I like to call"gliding." Now that I've read this book: same life, same stuff, with more confidence, looseness, liveliness. Here are a couple of my favorite excerpts from this wonderful book: "It's the gap between who you are and who you want to be that gives you leverage. The essence of right living lies in believing that your life is so important and has so much promise that you ask more of yourself than anyone else would ask of you. Not because you want to prove yourself but because you want to be everything that you really can be." To be oneself "...as fully, openly, grandly and freely as possible." I do hope you order this book, enjoy absorbing it and then maybe you'll report in here about your new "effortless" life. (P.S. If I did have a big sister, I would hope she'd be just like this book.)

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars All the good stuff in life always was effortless., August 29, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: The Art of Effortless Living (Hardcover)

My life had the usual struggles at work and with relationships from family to the clerk at the Motor Vehicle Department. Those struggles began to change as I read Effortless Living. I began to look at my relationship to the issues that I struggled with. I found that what I was doing that wasn't working was being generated by who I was being. If I was being fearful then I my words or behavior were skewed by the fear that was partnering my experience. Ingrid's book isn't a "how to change" book - rather it's an invitation to become present to what is happening. The awareness that has grown in me during my reading of Effortless Living has transformed my ability to wake up to my repetitive behaviors, see who I'm being and allow transformation to enter my life. The most positive outcome has been letting go of a successful career in New York and moving to Maui to begin a new life that is in line with who I (and my family have grown to be). Like all great teachers, Dr. Bacci doesn't tell us how to be - she leads us to the threshold of our own mind.