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Move Into Life: The Nine Essentials for Lifelong Vitality by Anat Baniel By Melissa J Wantuck  |
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In the genre of self-help books, seekers are hard-pressed to find a book that doesn’t require effort on their part to make the changes they want. That’s an impossible reality. Change requires work but a key aid to seekers is a book that connects their desire to tools that are easily available to them. It is in this book, Move Into Life: The Nine Essentials for Lifelong Vitality by Anat Baniel (Harmony Books, 2009), recently added this spring to the self-help shelf, that many seekers will find they already possess the two tools the book uses: mind and body.
There is no clear title associated with Anat Baniel in descriptions of her, including in her own biography. She calls herself a teacher and her goal is to teach her students to harness the connection that exists between the mind and body to achieve vitality. Her teaching methods give the impression she is using a combination of physical therapy and counseling. Her professional training is in psychology and statistics as well as dance so it is no surprise the practices of these constitute her program, called the Anat Baniel Method. It combines both mental and physical exercises to achieve the desired results for its participants.
The goal of the Anat Baniel Method is to increase an individual’s vitality. A dictionary’s definition of vitality has two parts. The first defines vitality as the life force of a living being distinguished by the ability of the living to grow and develop unlike the nonliving. The second definition is the increased energy used by the living to go beyond the basic requirements of a living being to improve growth and development.
Baniel defines what she calls nine essentials, or areas of improvement that all help to improve an individual’s vitality for a happier, healthier life. Each essential includes anecdotes from Baniel’s clients and at least one exercise. Some of the exercises are mental, the others are physical. The mental exercises are challenging and thought provoking. The physical exercises are simple yoga-like stretches with sketches of them to show how they’re done.
Baniel’s writing is fluid and without any kind of clinical language to distract readers. When she describes her work, however, the real processes she practices with her students is presented vaguely so while her book is meant to share her method with everyone, she isn’t.
Her essentials are easy to understand and linear. Baniel presents a clear line of progression and slowly moves the reader from point A to point B in a straightforward manner. Occasionally her anecdotes sound too good to be true and the tone becomes like an infomercial for the Anat Baniel Method.
The truly inspirational moment of the book comes at the end in the final two pages when in just a few paragraphs Baniel passionately describes the miraculous nature of the human brain with its endless possibilities and divine inspiration. Not only is it a shame this passion is missing from the beginning of the book, but those who don’t get to the end will miss out on what makes Baniel tick. That human connection evoked from reading such an emotional passage is more inspirational than all of the anecdotes Baniel supplies describing each of her Essentials.
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