Barbara De Angelis

Soren once said that if you accurately observe the events of your life, then you become a philosopher. I think that idea is kinda good for here, because although this is not a memoir by Barbara, (although there’s a memoir you can write for every category of books, more or less), I think it’s accurate to say that she teaches mostly from personal experience. Barbara does sprinkle quotes from various spiritual, scientific, and philosophical sources throughout the book, but that does not negate that she is essentially a simple woman and a person of the heart. I think it’s important to remember that there’s potentially a form of philosophy, or inquiry, available to each of us, and not only to the men of Europe, as philosophical as they can be.

Although it was a nice book, and I generally did not disagree with what Barbara wrote, I don’t think it’s the sort of book that would benefit from me trying to select or summarize or abstract from it. But it was certainly nice…. And I guess if I really wanted to balance myself, I’d read one of her spiritual relationship psychology books, instead of just meeting her as soon as she leaves that other country!

N.B. I thought of this at first as being a bit like Wayne’s book about the Sacred Self, the general enlightenment philosophy book, but although it is a bit like that book, I’ve since decided that it’s more like the Tara Brach book I have, half-philosophic but mostly applications and stories, not that full ethereal spiritual philosophy, you know. I don’t know. They’re similar and one’s not better or worse. But I think Barbara is in that space where she’d have just be a thoughtful, spiritual woman than a spiritual /philosopher/, you know. Of course, some philosophers are story weavers, but they tell them as this art of carving runes or something, secret stories woven in wisdom. Barbara would rather just tell stories to remain accessible while talking about the Highest, you know.… (meer)

For such a long time I used to tease my mom about reading Barbara De Angelis self help stuff! And for a longer time reading self help looked like an impossible task to me ( It still does,but at least i tried!) Not only they seemed like a waste of time but I could never seen any kind of change in self help book lovers attitude and behaviors. But well guess what? a marriage counselor recently recommended me to read Secrets about Men By Barbara! C'mon! Was that a joke? Still to show that I have my mind open to different ideas and also willing to put effort on my relationship I started reading it! (Ok, I know I learned my lesson here,I should never be mean to anyone for reading a book or it gonna happen to me! ) So as i was going through the book some stuff looked strangely familiar to me! The stories,Ideas and situations was nothing new of course,it is something that you can find in any relationship magazine and web site. But it was not only that. I read these somewhere before! After That Mars and Venus became popular everyone started to write books like this. So to see how much I really tried to help myself with these kind of books I went to check John Gray's page here on Goodreads and what I found made me unable to close my mouth for a minute : O
The amazing relationship experts where in a marriage back in 80's and they got a divorce after a while! So what can we actually learn from that? There marriage was such an awful mess that made both of them a relationship experts? They went through such a terrible mess that they decided to help others all around the world to never do the same thing again? Was it about bragging to each-other who can write a book that would sell best? Well, I won't judge. Maybe I am unable to see the point of it, but what can one actually learn from two relationship advisor who could not even get along together by combining all the knowledge they seems to have on marriage and relationships? Is the answer is you can learn from their mistakes? Well in this case I will be able to learn from anyone's mistakes,we don't really need a self help book for that,or do we?… (meer)