A Weekend to Change Your Life by Joan Anderson (#42, Nonfiction)

While I took some flack for reading this, I can see myself coming back again and again to this book. I will read it again, and I think I will get something new each time I do. There is a lot of wisdom, hope and inspiration in the pages of Joan Anderson's A Weekend to Change Your Life.

I remember watching the Oprah episode where Anderson talked about her year away from her husband. It was a year she spent getting to know herself. She said it was the best year of her life because it rejuvenated her spirit and gave her a better understanding of how she works as a person. This book offers readers everything she has learned, but in such a way that gives them the power to go out and find it on their own. While Anderson shares her hard earned lessons with you, she also gives you directions on how you can find your own answers.

I finished this book on the same day I read most of The Awakening and I must say, if only poor Edna had had this book at her disposal, she might not have walked into the water at the end. Anderson gives her readers the tools to find themselves. I look forward to doing the activities, to finding out about myself, to learning who I really am.

I underlined a lot in this book too. Here are some of the gems:

It's a weakness to just sit around and wait for life to come to you.

Relationships can only flourish when there is a meeting of the minds--when each party wants to continue seeking, developing, and eventually evolving.

Out of your very breakdown, you will experience myriad breakthroughs.

And my favorite, from psychologist Douglas LaBier: Each partner in a couple must leave the relationship, figuratively or literally, in order to find his or her gift or bliss, and then return with a newfound energy that will reignite the relationship. Long-term relationships need new energy, which they can get when either partner grows or changes.