I had been roughing it up in my life for a few years so when i saw this at the library, thought I'd give it a read. The book is useless and misleading to anyone who wants to learn about meditation. 2 stars, because some exercises were indeed interesting and usable with modifications and sometimes I did recognize statements of an obviously quite experienced meditator - but not one who understands why and how it works. And also not one who can teach it well. This was a fast easy read and is a positive way to frame up opportunity for us be happier and more successful taking away stuff that detracts from where we are going. These ten ideas are from notes found while reading about the book …

Let go of your need to be attached to people. People come and go. Let go of your attachment to people and focus on the love you have for them. there are many reasons why people could disagree with you and still be rational : their values might be different from yours, you and they could have different assumptions,they might have had a different experience to you, they might have information that you don't have or that you have chosen to ignore. pain patterns or incompletions are based on suppressed emotions which can rule our lives for decades. Another point he emphasizes is that you as a person is not a fixed entity. There is no quality about you that is fixed - you are not a nice person, a selfish person, a dependable person etc. No one is always nice. No one is always selfish. No one is always angry. No one is always kind.to understand your shadow, look at the people who annoy you. What annoys you about them is something you have suppressed in yourself and projected onto them. Written in a conversational tone, it was like a fireside chat with Mr Purkiss. He wrote mainly from his own life experiences and also from some friends who were happy to share their journey with him. I found a lot of simple truths in what he shared but the doing is so much harder because most of us are messed up inside ...but we can try, why not ? If we do something frequently, we start to recognize useful patterns. Experience provides us with generalizations about what's likely to happen next. It's very hard to stop thinking. It's better to give your mind something to do. Sit and relax, and bring your attention to your breath.

Let go of your expectations. When you have expectations, you are setting yourself up for disappointment. Instead, focus on the present moment and what you can control. Purkiss oversimplifies things dramatically. I think this is a great book for people who have been through therapy, namely CBT, and already have an idea of "how to let go," but in my opinion Purkiss expects a lot out of his readers and their ability to therapize themselves. He espouses the exercise to observe things as WHAT they are........not something attached to your feelings/judgement. The example I like was - A ferrari car makes you feel poor (hey.....wrong feelings, ok? ) versus A ferrari car is a mode of transportation ( a better way to see it so you don't feel bad about not having one!) constant reminders about “force above us”. that this force, universe, god - call it anyway you wish - have the ultimate power over people’s lives. of course, it is author’s worldview, but he presents it as an ultimate truth, but there are no proofs to it. moreover, it is an ultimate topic of philosophy, but if we suggest that there is no “higher power”, what is it that guide us through life? answer to this, is we ourselves do this. there is no “plan” or “fate” that will magically work if we step down of our expectations. only other people with their decisions, which outcomes will affect us the same way our decisions affect other people’s life (“butterfly effect”). ultimately, the only thing we should learn is to accept, that it doesn’t matter how detailed plan we got, something won’t go the way we want it. and it is not destiny. Let go of your need to control everything. You can't control everything that happens in life, so don't try. Let go and trust that things will work out the way they are supposed to.

I liked the ideas in this book, even if it had a lot of "And I learnt this from an esteemed Indian spiritual guide" going on. The exercises could have been fleshed out more with concrete examples. One of the exercises I found useful was the one about thinking what about a goal you want to achieve: Let go of your fear of the future. The future is uncertain, but that doesn't mean it's going to be bad. Let go of your fear and trust that everything will work out.

The Power of Letting Go brings together a number of key principles that come up for anyone who is on the journey of self-enquiry and development. At some point, the choice becomes clear, whether to hold on or let go. I shouldn't fight against the huge waves, as they would always be stronger than me and push me under. I should just collaborate with them. All these reasons why it can't happen are incompletions /pain patterns. Do the completion exercise, identity the incident when each pain pattern started. What happened? Write it down. Relive each incident at least 5 times. Allow everything that makes you powerless to come to the surface and leave your system.His teachings around mindfulness are generally oversimplified and cover only a subset of known mindfulness techniques used in buddhist practices and in mindfulness psychology. The former he seems to not really like even though he reuses the classical anchor meditation in different versions in his exercises (selling each as different or not understanding the common denominator). The latter he obviously has no clue about. He seems to be largely into a very spiritual and traditional hinduism Vedic practice and transcendental meditation. His explanations for why those practices and classic meditation techniques work are largely useless and oversimplified. For instance, he tells you to "just keep telling yourself your painful story until you get bored with it" and then doesn't tell you what to do if you don't get bored with it... if it's still just as painful every time you think about it. Granted, that's what therapy is for and he DOES have a disclaimer to discuss this with your healthcare or mental health provider... but if I'm going to do that, why do I need your book, Purkiss? people who accept themselves as they are do not feel the need to hide qualities which some people may not like. Let go of your need to be right. It's okay to be wrong sometimes. In fact, it's often a good thing. Let go of your need to be right and be open to learning new things. Before reading it, I suspected it to be a simple introduction to mindfulness techniques, but it is very simple at that and even worse: it consists of a mixture of misleading pop psychology ideas (amongst others relying on Katie Byron whose work I personally don't resonate at all with) with some useful and reasonable experiences around mindfulness meditation. But even his description of meditation is connected with overly exaggerated effects such as "no thoughts" - even buddhist monks still have thoughts most of the time ;) and in all his examples, he only ended up with at most a few minutes without thoughts. I also didn't understand why one even should chase that experience so desperately?

us being only consciousness. no we are not. just as we are not only mind and body. this things work in a triad - taking away at least one of this elements, we cannot be considered as humans at all. person can go all consciousness and mind, but what will happen to the body? or if one neglects consciousness, all the work with mind and body will be useless. and in neglecting mind - ultimately, what that person will be good for? nothing. balance between everything is a key, you cannot just throw away one element and expect everything will be all right. if you are developing a new product or service, it's best to keep an open mind. It may evolve into something you have never imagined.we manifest our beliefs, not our desires. Once you are complete, your beliefs and desires become one. Then your desires start to become reality. Let go of your need to judge others. Everyone is on their own journey. Let go of your need to judge others and focus on your own path. I stopped after chapter 3. I will skim the rest as I am leading a book club discussion for it. I thought I was going to LOVE this book. It seemed to align with a lot of what I was already learning through "thought work" which uses concepts from Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT).