By Eoin Meegan
The Positive Habit is a self help book with a difference. Built around six emotional states – love, calmness, confidence, gratitude, hope and happiness – which the author, therapist Fiona Brennan has identified as being crucial to our overall development. Actually there are seven, but the first one, ‘presence’, is considered as a kind of essential prelude, or foundation from which the others arise.
The habits form a layer that build systematically on one another. The first, love, is about being comfortable with loving ourselves as well as others. This is followed by calmness and confidence, which organically grow from each other and from love.
When we have learned to cultivate that inner stillness we are naturally more inclined to take the required action to follow our dreams. Confidence is really an expression of self belief.
“It is this presence and the space between your thoughts that is the essence of peace and freedom from the thinking mind.” (page 110).
Which brings us to gratitude, a perennial in all self-help literature. However, the Positive Habit views gratitude as the ability to be thankful for something before you receive it or before it happens.
This is followed by hope, which often contains aspects of doubt, but I feel what is meant here is trust: trusting that things will work out (or that we will still be alright if they don’t). All which leads to the ultimate prize of happiness.
“You are not your negative thoughts. There is a space that exists between you and your thoughts; this is presence, this is peace.” (page 122).
Not simply blithe advice about thinking positive and avoiding the negative, the Positive Habit connects us to something that we know was always there, but which we were not quite aware of.
The book is audible and interactive, coming with thirteen free audio downloads which you can access via a password hidden in its pages, and exercises that test your progress as you work through it, such as mindful showering and affirmational tooth-brushing.
You’ll have to read the book to find out what they are! In many ways, reading this book is like sitting down and having a face-to-face session with the author. A great source to help you finally make that breakthrough to the new positive you.
The Positive Habit by Fiona Brennan (2019) published by Gill Books, price €16.99.
Available at Books on The Green (01) 283 7909.
