Customer Reviews

The Mini-Retreat Solution

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This book offers simple and practicle ideas for understanding and reducing stress in day to day living. There are valuable self assessments to help gauge where you are at any time and well laid out steps that get you started reducing stress and feeling relaxed right away. I highly recommmend this book for people in all situations (work, parenting, relationships etc) it delivers!

Ms. James has written a lovely book to help you build refreshing breaks into your day. As she points out, research shows that relaxing your mind every two hours or so is very beneficial for your stress level, your health, and your productivity. Ms. James shows you how to implement this idea. She gives you lots of ideas for mini-retreats, so you can find ones that suit you. And she presents a very convincing case for the importance of mini-retreats. Reading her book is like having a session with her and having her gently guide you and inspire you to take better care of yourself. The book is a refreshing retreat in itself.

The section on barriers to taking retreats is great, since that's where the rubber meets the road. The difficulty is believing it enough to do it, and remembering to do it. Mini-retreats are the kind of thing we know would be good for us, but are easy to postpone. I am a therapist working down the road from Microsoft, and as you can imagine, I have some challenges in getting my clients to take breaks! Now I can recommend this book so the message will sink in a little deeper. I really like the idea of the illustrated post-it notes she offers as reminders.

This is a great book to keep on your Kindle so you can dip into it whenever you need a new idea for a break.

Lastly, it is beautifully designed and illustrated. A real pleasure!

Knowing that we need to de-stress and reclaim more balance in our lives is one thing. The challenge is how to do this in a quick easy way that achieves instant results. Julia offers simple albeit powerful solutions (and plenty of them!) that have helped me not only de-stress but reconnect with my values to help me make the best decisions I can. I've even found my creativity gets a boost because I'm more grounded throughout the day.

I recommend keeping this book near you at all times and seriously... who doesn't enjoy a retreat!

In this hurried, get things done world, many people find themselves feeling stressed, tired, overworked and underappreciated.
This wonderful book is full of short mini-retreats that will re-energize your day. Some of the mini-retreats can be done in a moment or two and have remarkable effects on our moods and attitudes.

There are over 80 mini-retreats to choose from. Some of the mini-retreats can even be done in traffic or while on public transit.

I highly recommend The Mini-Retreat Solution to anyone who wants to achieve better self-care in moments a day.

Denny Stockdale

Everyone can benefit from a mini-retreat. Julia provides an easy to follow, cookbook style approach, to blending relaxing moments into the 21st Century lifestyle.

This book is practical, easy to use, and doesn't require a lot of time. And most importantly, it brings meditation out of the world of gurus and into the daily habits that any of us can do.

Thank you, Julia, I'll be using this in my work and adding it to my day-to-day life coping skills tool kit!

Susan Berg, PhD, author of "Choose on Purpose for Twentysomethings", [...].

Julia James' Book the Mini-Retreat solution is a wonderful way of connecting back to your body's ease. By training yourself to relax deeply, often, and easily the 'mini retreats' in this book are a surefire way of improving your health by tapping into relaxation.

Great strategies that are easy and can be incorporated into even the busiest life! Even the organization of this book is stress-free, giving you mini-retreats by location- hehe, even in the washroom where sometimes that's the only place to find 2 minutes to re-center.


Keep it in your car or purse for the first month and use one every day to give yourself a break, with as little as a few breaths.
If you're stressed, move your body, breathe, and then pick up this book!

-Sarah Harrison
Author and Producer of "Gentle Yoga for Better Digestion" DVD

In her introduction, Julia James talks about how mini-retreats ... or breaks throughout our day can positively add to our quality of life. In this world where many of us are focused on the computer screen in front of us for hours and hours and hours every day, this is especially important.

Incorporating mini-retreats in your day will help you de-stress and will end up ADDING to your day instead of taking away from it. An all too easy excuse is, "I don't have time to take a break." In reality, you will ADD to your time and productivity by taking loads of mini-retreats throughout your day.

Julia James has included dozens upon dozens of ideas for how to incorporate mini-retreats into your life. I highly recommend getting her book and giving all her suggestions at least one try ... and then incorporating your favorites into the rest of your life!

Melanie Rockett