Customer Reviews

Epiphanies: A Psychotherapist's Tales of Spontaneous Emotional Healing

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I hope that word of this little gem of a book gets out in spite of its audience-narrowing subtitle. This is not a book about psychotherapy. Or at least it's not simply a book about psychotherapy. With great good humor, touching lyricism and intelligent insight, family therapist Ann Jauregui conducts a magical mystery tour, exploring life's ah hah moments in science, psychotherapy, and religion.

She asks how it happens that something quite ordinary triggers a change in perception as when looking at an Escher print. Without fanfare or warning, edges blur and suddenly something familiar shifts. Light falls on a new path and nothing is ever quite the same again.

As entertaining as this book is, it should be read slowly. Take the time to enjoy Jauregui's good company and make sure you don't miss a single insight along the way. In a world full of promised quick fixes and self-help guides, Ann Jauregui's Epiphanies offers something deeper and more humbling -- a newly generous sense of wonder, optimism and possibility.

Ann Jauregui stretches our minds so that we too begin to see and have epiphanies, moments of opening to new life and light and joy. Once we are looking and listening freed from the box of nineteenth century science, epiphanies are there, as natural and real as butterflies. A great read, accurately poetic and scientific at once, with stories of clients, scientists (Newton and Hawking), and Ann Jauregui herself. An important book for therapists, especially those of us who are ready for life changes to be happening in our offices and wondering why they are going on next door, not with us. This book has the power to change us and those we want to help.

Once in a while, I find a book that has the ability to shatter my world--but not in a bad way. It shatters it in such a way as to tear away the walls that bind my mind thereby allowing the light to come flooding in. Jauregui does this for me in her book Epiphanies. Chapter by chapter she builds on the idea that things may not be totally as we think they are or as they first appear. This book left me wanting more and I can only hope she is already working on her next book.

This book has had a lasting effect on the way I look at life. I have the utmost appreciation for Ann Jauregui and her life accomplishments. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in bettering their time on this wonderful earth.

Roger Neef

If you love science and psychotherapy this is the book for you.
I found the only really interesting parts were when she spoke of her clients and their inner journeys and epiphanies. The other material, and it felt as if it was 2/3 of the book was a bit dry for me.
I gave it three stars because of the following story:
"A man approaches Picasso at an exhibit of his work and says with great exasperation,"Why can't you paint more realistically?"
Picasso thinks for a minute and says, "Realistically, I guess I don't know what that is."
Frustrated, the man takes a photograph from his billfold and says, "Look! Like this. This is my wife."
Picasso takes the picture in his hand and looks at it. "She's so small," he says, and turning the photo sideways, "and so thin!."