Grounded Spirituality Kindle Edition

Jeff Brown's book Grounded Spirituality it contains many great insights which are sadly presented in a pedantic, over simplified and a dismissive way. While I would agree with many of his insights around the spiritual movement and practices, he often throws the baby out with the bath water. The new age is filled with pithy phrases which are thrown around as universal truths..."we're all one" or "just be love" are replaced by his own, "a quest for enrealment". Spiritual bypass is not new and maybe it's a resting place for those who aren't ready to take the next step. He shows a clear lack of understanding the role projection plays in the human psyche and the opportunity it offers us. While it's important to awaken our emotional body his indulgence in its expression shows lack of a deeper understanding.The crux of his work and that of all others I've read is the usage of a word and lack of defining what is means. That word is consciousness. It is a word being banded about in both spiritual and non-spiritual communities. Can we even agree on what it really means. I agree with his premise that you should challenge spiritual dogma, including his. Your awakening must be grounded in your experience and how you integrate it. Expand your tools, sift through the crap (your body will know), develop your own practices and then live them in your life. In this way you don't seek purpose, it finds you!I highly recommend the work of Debbie Ford for a deeper understanding of shadow and the nature of projection. The work of Karla McLaren in understanding the true nature of emotion. In closing I offer my pithy phrase...GURU....Gee You Are You. The question, is it the one you want to be?

I want to preface this negative review by saying that I now realize that I'm not the target audience of the author's marketing campaign. I fell for some facebook spam promoting the book, so I should've known better. It's probably intended for misguided millennials who are using spiritual concepts to rationalize their own veiled egotism. I would not recommend this book to someone who has been studying for 5 years or more. It is basically a spiritual book for bros; every other word is "dude", I guess the author believes that this makes the book more accessible to millennials (I am not a millennial, but I still found it patronizing). The fictitious interview was cringeworthy and self-indulgent, seeming to mimic the style of Neale Donald Walsch. Style aside though, the author has indeed highlighted some pitfalls of misunderstanding the idea of non-dualism. But instead of clarifying these misunderstandings, the author's take is overly-simplistic and regressive, further convoluting the core teachings -- instead of pushing the seeker to keep going forward. If the seeker keeps going on the journey, the concept of dual and non-dual ultimately collapses into one knowing. Yes, people can certainly go into spiritual bypass by allowing "oneness" to subsume them and rationalize an avoidance of any real personal work. But there is a more accurate and nuanced perspective which you will find by studying the masters -- not the over-simplified either/or proposition in this book.

I did not like this book at all. I found the author to be a whiny crybaby who only thought about himself. I felt he distrusted anybody that didn’t believe in what he did. No compassion, no soul. Also, the way it was written was ridiculous and difficult for the reader.

What was disappointing for me was the formate of the book. I started following the author on social media and loved the information he provided. The small story formate. The insights to life. Wisdom. He has so much to offer.I guess I expected the same from the book, in the same formate. I expected this because he said that his insights provided to social media were excerpts from the book. The book was written as an interview. The formate was hard to follow. It was disappointing. I set it down after about 20 pages. The content may have been great but I could not power through this book. The text is extremely small too... not a great thing for people who have eyesight issues.

66 pages of author's "story".....then in q and a form....

I have searched, many decades, for spiritual truth and healing. Toxic religion left me with dysfunctional beliefs which steered me away from healing. We all have trauma from surviving in a violent, unpredictable, and chaotic world. Reaching for spiritual practice, religion or new age, had left me confused and lying to my body. Reading Jeff Brown's book validates my listening to my body, respecting intuition and body wisdom, releasing traumatic memory, and activating energy circuits so I experience a flow of healing energy. I have only begun with reading this book but already feel grounded with spiritual truths. I hope this book finally heals and releases all the religious programming that was shoved down my throat for way too long. If my opinion changes, as I finish this book, I will add an update. But, obviously, I am already feeling I'm finding answers which finally make sense to me (I work in the field of integrative mental health and have intensely studied trauma informed care). I believe Jeff Brown has done much deep diving, using much intelligence and intuition, to have sorted through so much disinformation.

I found this book very useful and inspiring to live a fuller life. The author guides us through asking the questions about our purpose in life and guides in stepping into that fully ourselves and togeather in relationships. I reccomend the book to anyone who wants to live a fuller, bigger more beautiful life :)

Jeff Brown has only one point to make, and that is that bioenergetics is the only personal development approach worth bothering with - and he makes the point over and over again across 100s of pages of overblown tedious text. In a series of incoherent rants, he dismisses yoga, meditation, Eckhart Tolle and all other spiritual paths - Only one person knows the true path, and that is Jeff Brown. When a prospective publisher suggests that his manuscript could benefit from editing, he is outraged - and is deluded enough to share this feedback with his readers over several pages - thus making his tedious book even longer. In fact he devotes his several hundred pages to describing his heroic struggles during the writing of this ludicrous book. Despite his enthusiasm for bodywork and bioenergetics in particular, he doesn't devote any of his precious words to explaining what they're about in any serious way - instead we are treated to more tales of his heroism as he strains and struggles with the demons embedded in his physical body. (I personally think that bioenergetics has a great deal to offer - but Jeff Brown's enthusiasm would make me think twice if I hadn't already experienced it).He devotes an entire sprawling section of the book to slagging off 'spritual bypassers', in particular the world-renowned spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle, and he lumps pretty much all yogis and meditation experts together in this category.I was obliged to read this book as part of a spiritual group I attend, but I have to say I learned nothing from it except what a self-satisfied wally Jeff Brown is. I guess I'm judging him pretty harshly, but I'd like to at least warn people before they waste their time and money on this awful book.

The overall message of this book is not bad, but my personal advice is save yourself the time and money. This book is mostly written for "spiritual bypassers" (people on the spiritual path who deny their emotions or dissociate from them). I found the message to 'embody our emotions' to be quite repetitive (even though I agree with this idea). The author assumes that the majority of people will resist wanting to integrate their shadow, and even though that's probably true in society at large, this is not a new concept, and many individuals have been embracing their positive as well as negative aspects for thousands of years. The book can certainly be helpful to some, but I was looking for something a little more refined and integrous. It's one thing to disagree with someone's teachings (Eckhart Tolle, Byron Katie), but quite another to completely invalidate their experience, as Jeff Brown does in his book: "Tolle purported being "peace", but it was not the kind of integrated, enlivened peace that comes at the end of a long, transformational healing journey into the heart of the embodied self. This was either pure dissociation, as many therapists would identify, or an initial stage of awakening..."(...) "A suicidal man does not fully heal and transform his consciousness in the course of one night."(p.27) After reading this book, I happened to find the book "The Path is Everywhere" by Matt Licata, PhD at my local library, and it's essentially the same message, but written in a much clearer, more helpful, luminous, compassionate and polished way. Some people will resonate with Jeff Brown's style, I just didn't.

I wasn't able to get through the whole book because it is not based in deep spiritual experience. It is a long imagined dialogue (really, an imagined dialogue of Jeff discussion concepts with some imagined non-dual purist that as the emotional intelligence of a rigid 12 year-old) that is designed to prove Jeff's point that non-dual purist have missed the mark. Yes, they have, we know, no reason to write hundreds of pages to prove a point your making with yourself Jeff.Also, don't randomly attack Eckart Tolle and try to invalidate his whole teaching because it triggered you. There's actually a chapter called Eckart Tolle, and the sum up is : Jeff says he has unresolved terror on the basis of Jeff felt Eckart has unresolved terror.Now the reason that I am giving 2 stars is because there are certain passages that are absolute jems. Really. But you don't need the book for that, just go on his facebook page and read the posts on the pictures. That's why I bought the book. Because of those jems. well....it's like those movie trailers where they put aaalllllllll the good parts in the trailer...nothing left in the movie. Same with is book.

This is a profound book that offers true hope and mostly gentle guidance for forging an authentic path forward as individuals and as a collective humanity. Fearless sharing of experience and challenging of sacred cows helps reorient with the inner compass and codes by which sacred purpose is realized.

Love this book. Gets the old mind working. Very intuitive and thought provoking. Love it.