The Mythic Path: Discovering the Guiding Stories of Your Past: Creating a Vision for Your Future

The Promise of Energy Psychology: Revolutionary Tools for Dramatic
Personal Change

Reviewed by Douglas J. Moore

Two powerful self-help books have recently been published, each showing its readers how to draw upon compelling psychological and spiritual principles for creating a better life. Each provides reliable methods for freeing yourself from the grips of unconscious patterns that have interfered with your happiness, success, and well-being. Each shows you how to move on to new vistas led by your deepest wisdom. And each is an authoritative guide for personal evolution that also holds strong social implications, as we must all evolve quickly if we are to save our species and planet from the ravishes of the collective habitual behaviors that are leading us toward destruction.

These two works each come, however, from such a different angle that it takes a moment to realize they both promise the same benefits. One focuses on the forest; the other focuses on the trees. One has you examining and making shifts in your life in terms of its broad guiding themes. Changing the forest changes the trees. The other gives you tools for making small but decisive changes, one at a time, at the level of the intricate programming that is patterned in your brain. Changing the trees changes the forest. Interestingly, each book has the same lead author, a clinical psychologist and three-decade AHP member who has devoted a career toward empowering people outside the clinical setting.

THE MYTHIC PATH

The Mythic Path: Discovering the Guiding Stories of Your Past-Creating a Vision for Your Future gives us a way to think about, relate to, and dance with the dimensions of our existencethat are greater than ordinary consciousness can usually embrace. Mythology has always been a bridge between the human mind and the human spirit, and this book succeeds in personalizing that quest. It is a 12-week program that has been evolving for more than 30 years, since first author David Feinstein conceived it based on research he was conducting into “new therapies” while on the faculty of the Department of Psychiatry at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. The book takes you through a program for systematically examining the grand themes that have shaped your life-the music to which you have danced and will continue to dance if you do not change the tune-and helping you to make decisive changes to bring that music closer to your heart’s wisdom and desire. With its lineage tracing back to the research program at Hopkins, it synthesizes the best psychological and spiritual self-help methods ever devised into a user-friendly program that can be accomplished a couple of evenings per week over three months. The publisher calls it “a powerful antidote for modern lives caught in the disorienting grip of a world in turmoil.”

THE PROMISE OF ENERGY PSYCHOLOGY

The Promise of Energy Psychology: Revolutionary Tools for Dramatic Personal Change introduces an innovation that was not available during the Hopkins research project in the early 1970s. It is, in fact, one of the most exciting developments to come from the psychotherapy arena in decades. Energy psychology is a tool for emotional self-management that allows you to change the tones on the keyboard of your psyche. Through simple, mechanical procedures, you are shown how to eliminate irrational fears, inappropriate anger, maladaptive anxiety, prolonged grief, unwarranted jealousy-the whole spectrum of everyday emotions that may go awry. You also learn how such emotions keep us trapped in lifelong patterns that interfere with our happiness and success. The field of energy psychology applies the 5,000-year-old healing art of acupuncture to psychological problems and goals. Called “acupuncture without needles,” you tap a set of points while bringing the psychological problem or goal to mind. The tapping is believed to send signals to the brain that change the neurological underpinnings of the problem. Simple, neat, effective. Replant a few trees in your emotional landscape and the forest starts to take on a new contour. The approach is proving itself in some of the toughest situations imaginable, where it has been successfully utilized by disaster teams going into post-civil war Kosovo and Rawanda and post-hurricane and post-tsunami areas. The book is written by Feinstein and two other leaders in this rapidly emerging specialty, Donna Eden and Gary Craig.

Feinstein, in his preface to the new third edition of The Mythic Path (co-authored with the renowned psychologist Stanley Krippner), describes how after three decades of refining their model for helping people consciously change their guiding myths, the emergence of energy psychology was a shocking and exciting development. The authors found that by applying energy psychology methods at various stages of the personal mythology program, the results were even more profound and lasting. And that is why there is a third edition to the already highly respected book, whose first edition in 1986 was lauded by Joseph Campbell, Jean Houston, Ashley Montagu, Stanislav Grof, and many other luminaries in the field. The third edition adds a support guide for introducing energy psychology into the personal mythology model. The support guide is an optional addition to the program, but a powerful one. It assumes that the reader has some basic skills in energy psychology.

Working with the two books in combination is one of best things you could do to tend the trees and the forests of your inner life.

DOUGLAS J. MOORE, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist and life-coach in Cleveland, Ohio. He integrates traditional psychological methods with the practice of mindfulness, the wisdom of the Enneagram, and principles from energy medicine and energy psychology. He may be reached at [email protected].

Editor’s Note: The Mythic Path third edition won the 2007 National Indie Excellence Book Award in the New Age Nonfiction category, and The Promise of Energy Psychology was a finalist (second place) in the Self-Help Category. The awards are given by the Independent Booksellers Association.