Review of “The Woo Woo Way” by Sandy Evenson

Score: 94/100 (9.4 out of 10)

The Woo Woo Way is a fascinating self-help book by Sandy Evenson with some compelling ideas for balancing and aligning your chakras, releasing your stored energy, and living your best life! This book combines spirituality with psychiatry in a seamless and beautiful way. This is ultimately a therapeutic book about mindfulness, healing, and unleashing your maximum zest.

Now, admittedly, there were things about this book that disarmed us and put us off initially. However, once we got over the goofy-sounding (albeit memorable) title and the seemingly pseudo-scientific, quack-like premise, we found that there was a ton to like and love about this book!

For one, the concept behind this book is actually something the resonates with us. One of our reviewers is a long-time yoga instructor, and the book's ideas about balancing chakras and releasing it as tension from different parts of the body is part of traditional yoga practice. Another of our reviewers is very fascinated with the concept of ruasch, shakti, chi, or spiritual energy. They're also interested in kabbalah, which is arguably another form of this line of thinking. So, this book is something that's right up our alley.

Another great thing about this book is that, unlike many positivity/self-affirmation books, it's not a book about somehow deleting or ignoring your negative thoughts or tricking yourself into being happy or being successful. It's a book about confronting, understanding, and coming to terms with all of your feelings, even the negative ones—to be a complete person who is allied with and able to use all aspects/parts of the self. That, believe it or not, is a fresh and unique perspective in the realm of self-help books, many of which just encourage you to be happy when you're unhappy, not sad when you're sad, not angry when you're angry, not anxious when you're anxious, and not depressed when you're depressed. Yeah, that's easier said than done, and the author of this particular book definitely understands and acknowledges that.

This isn't a book about fixing, changing, fighting with, or being at war with yourself, it's a book about being at peace with yourself and using ALL parts of your being for the betterment of yourself.

Ok, well, let's dive into it...

The Woo Woo Way seems to involves balancing and aligning the different chakras spread throughout the body that are normally suppressed by different, hidden blocks. The author has a rather interesting, fitting, and fascinating way of describing the arrangement of chakras throughout the body, describing them as being like areas (or rooms) of a house. That's something that we could really understand and an analogy that we fell in love with.

For example, the second (“Sacral”) chakra is described as being like a basement with a water heat and central air. It's not something that's immediately visible or apparent, but it's important and always running in the background. This is where life-force energy is stored, after all. Meanwhile, the sixth (“Third Eye”) chakra is like the attic. This is the high place where you can get the best view of town—or the world around you. It's all about perspective and perception, taking all of your lenses and putting them together to see the big picture.

There's a rather interesting story involving the Third Eye chakra in which the author describes talking to a client in the Middle East who, it turned out, had been hiding in a closet because she was video-calling from an active war-zone. This gave the author a bigger, broader, more macro, and eye-opening new perspective of what their client was going through. Not only was the client going through their own anxieties and depressions, but they were going through something else in the background: a literal war.

The author has a beautiful line about opening the curtains to let light in, giving you a clearer perspective of things that would've otherwise been unclear or hidden entirely. It's like spring cleaning. When you open the curtains, the light illuminates a lot of things, some of which you may have lost or hadn't seem in years, maybe even some old treasures/gems or skeletons in the closet.

Heck, we're kinda in the middle of spring cleaning in our office and we're constantly finding things that we could've used and/or saved money on replacing. But from an emotional perspective, we all have things that we just hide and bury deep down inside thinking that they'll go away. However, they come up in the most random and inconvenient of times. One such example that the author uses is the fear of public speaking. That's an example of a phobia/fear that must've come from somewhere, probably an experience earlier in life in which the sufferer was bullied, shamed, and/or failed.

The author talked about a few other things that really hit us between the eyes, especially considering that we've read so many self-help books and autobiographies that clued us in to certain aspects of depression, anxiety, and mental illness. The big one for us was when the author described how we have different shadows inside of us. Some of them are big, seemingly-bad bullies. Some represent our inner-child. All in all, these shadows are not bad or evil. They actually love us and want to protect us. That is why you can't just we can't just ignore or erase our feelings, that would be like ignoring or erasing a part of ourselves. But the thing about this that made us say “AHA!” was that it sounds an awful lot like what Catherine was going through with her multiple personalities in You Will Never Be Normal by Catherine Klatzer. The big, bad bully shadow sounded like the villainous side of Catherine known as Cat, who, it turned out, was only so big and tough because she was trying to protect Catherine from danger (similar to the shadows in this book). Catherine's other personalities, Baby and Tina, seem to reflect Evenson's concept of the inner-child shadows.

Ignoring our problems and being fake-positive ignores these shadows and thus the ignores the root of our feelings and selves. It's like trying to build a house without the support beams or strong soil to put the foundation. The idea, ultimately, is to turn your house (body) into a home, to be comfortable with who you are and where you are.

One great analogy that this book makes about shadows is that ignoring them is like ignoring the mold behind the wall or the rust on the pipes. It's going to come out eventually.

Now, this book makes a huge emphasis on a technique known as tapping. We found this fascinating, but also a little odd. However, we'd be lying if we said we didn't try it ourselves. Tapping kinda makes sense. See, when you stop to tap on your head, your steering-wheel, or your keyboard, it forces you to stop and be mindful. It also kinda reminded us of the concept of NEAT (non exercise activity thermogenesis) in which you can use little movements and fidgeting throughout the day to release energy, usually for fitness purposes. It also kinda reminded us of how some athletes swear by slapping themselves before a strenuous activity to wake themselves up or get the blood flowing. According to the author, tapping is like flipping a switch.

This was a very interesting read!

Check it out on Amazon!