Healing Your Heart, By Changing Your Mind

A Spiritual and Humorous Approach to Achieving Happiness

By: Dr. Jeffrey L. Gurian

Narrated by: Dr. Jeffrey L. Gurian

Length: 3 hrs and 35 mins

Publisher's summary

Have you ever felt you were more sensitive than you wanted to be? 

Has anyone ever hurt your feelings, lied, or broken a promise to you? 

Does the concept of "heart wounds" resonate with you on any level?  

Does this statement make sense to you? You can't get better with the same mind that got you sick. You need new thoughts and new knowledge in order to be healed!  

Imagine if you could learn how to eliminate things and thoughts that seem to be blocking you from achieving happiness.   

Dr. Jeffrey Gurian shares in his book Healing Your Heart, By Changing Your Mind - A Spiritual and Humorous Approach to Achieving Happiness how he has learned through his own personal experience and years of study to overcome all the above and more. 

Burdened with a severe stutter until he was in his 20's and beyond, seemingly unable to be helped by therapy, and combined with the confusion of A.D.D. and a bit of O.C.D. thrown in, he was faced with having to deal with that for the rest of his life.  

His low self-esteem and lack of confidence told him he would never have the things that other people had. He engaged in negative thinking.  

He felt he would never marry, have children, a successful career, or even something simple as having his own apartment!  

Being "graced" with the knowledge that there was really nothing wrong with him, he worked on basically "taking his mind apart" and examining all his thoughts to find the negative ones that were not valid.  

He used this technique to heal himself of his stutter and go on to achieve all the things he feared he would never have, becoming a husband, a father, and a homeowner.  

He also became a cosmetic dentist, a clinical professor at a major New York university in the Oral Medicine/Oro-Facial Pain Department, a lecturer, a comedy writer for many big stars, a comedian, author, radio and TV personality, and a healer.  

It's this journey and how he did it that he wants to share with you. And being one of the only doctors with a long, successful career in comedy has given him a very unique perspective on how to incorporate humor into your life.  

In this book you will learn:

• How to overcome the fear that's stopping you from achieving your goals
• How to release the "heart wounds" that affect every decision you make
• How to examine your thoughts to discover which ones are not valid
• How to stay connected to your "inner child" and create your own "Happiness Center"
• How to reprogram your mind through the use of affirmations

©2017 Dr. Jeffrey L. Gurian (P)2018 Tantor

Good concepts presented with false claims

After stumbling across this book I decided to pick it up on Audible since the price was quite reasonable. As a mental health counselor who also draws inspiration from concepts like the chakras and values the work of people like Anodea Judith, I thought this might have some interesting ideas. While it does have a good concept at its core - that changing your perception of past hurts can enhance your ability to engage with the present and take the future as it comes - that core concept is muddled in a lot of excessively broad generalizations that go so far that they become blatant falsehoods. The idea itself resonates very much with the ideas of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy as various other counseling modalities. Unfortunately, unlike Anodea Judith's work that pairs more esoteric concepts with western sensibilities to explore the overlap between those esoteric practices and ideas supported by science and psychology, Dr. Gurian leans heavily on the New Agey side of things. While he attempts to ground his ideas in medicine by talking about his experiences in a dentist, he also goes into the realm of heavy-handed myopia to the point of quackery in claiming that the temporomandibular joint is essentially the key to so much of what ails the body. While the idea that there are key points in the body's chains of movement and functioning that impact other parts of those chains has merit, Dr. Gurian presents the TMJ as if it is somehow THE key to much of what might ail someone physically. Unfortunately, this comes off as the same kind of narrowly-focused view many other "noted healers" in the New Age and less scientifically-grounded holistic movement present wherein they claim they have THE singular secret to health and vitality.

The key issue I took with this book, however, was the author's tendency to make such sweeping overgeneralizations that what seemed like well-intentioned comments became utter falsehoods. For example, at one point Dr. Gurian's discussion of connecting with a higher power for this work is important because humans cannot do or know everything. He states that we cannot make the sun or moon rise and we cannot know why they do so. While I appreciate the spirit of the comment, the fact remains that we **do** know why the sun and moon rise. The sun rises because of the rotation of the Earth and the moon rises because of it's orbit around the Earth. I get that the point was to assert that there are many mysteries to life and the universe that we have yet to understand but he undermines that point by pointing to a "mystery" that is actually an easily-explainable phenomenon.

Perhaps the most blatantly false statement I heard in the entire book was the assertion that the incorporation of a "higher power" in the 12-step model of addiction recovery is the reason that it is, according to him, the **only** addiction-recovery model that works at all. I won't draw this review out with statistics about success rates and relapse rates with the 12-step model but the assertion that it is the only addiction-recovery model that works is not simply misinformation, it is a blatant falsehood.

These are just a couple of the patently false statements the author uses in an effort to support his stance or illustrate his point. Ultimately, this book has some good ideas to it but they are buried under a lot of false assertions and self-indulgent storytelling that, frankly, reads more like whining than anecdotes to illustrate how he has healed himself from his own approach. If you can look past the misinformation you can find some good ideas in here but, to be honest, there are better books out there that present the same concepts in much more approachable and psychologically valid means that tie in nicely with New Age sensibilities and outlooks.

Unlike anything I’ve read.

If you want a book that fits neatly into a category this one might not work for you. It straddles self-help, trauma therapy, spirituality, and humor (!)

He pulls it together nicely, though, through an unusual, rambling sort of account of one man’s journey. In a sense this rambling structure is one of his key ideas: “don’t be so uptight” he seems to be saying – “let yourself go” – I have never experienced anything quite like the flavor of fun and playfulness he bring to self-help –the “category” for his message might not exist.

Since I read a lot of memoirs, I found myself intrigued by the memoir-like aspects of this book. He was sharing his fascinating journey to discover these insights for himself. So listening to it as a sort of memoir provided a bit of a roadmap through his extensive list of self-help topics.

Some reviewers have expressed concern that his delivery is “flat.” I didn’t hear it that way. He has what is known in comedy as “deadpan humor.” So another requirement for enjoying this book is to give him a “playful ear”- if you tune into his ironic humor, (as I did) you might find the listening experience to be informative, uplifting, and inspiring.

Just what I needed

I have had this book in my audio library for a while until I was finally was ready to receive it today. Thoroughly enjoyed every minute. Grateful for the gift of the message. Starting the work to heal my heart using STAR.
Thank you

The narration…No bueno

The first audiobook I cannot finish! It sounds like a great concept and a great book; however, the author doing the reading is way too monotone. He reminds me of the teacher from Ferris Bueller and or the same guy that does the Clear Eyes commercials from back in the day. If there were if there was ever a different narrator, I would give this book a try again, but in the meantime, I’m just deleting it because I can’t finish it. ever a different narrator, I would give this book a try again, but in the meantime, I’m just deleting it because I can’t finish it.

Positivity

Jeffrey,

Great book, easy to listen and wonderful clarification about life and important things in life!!!
Loved it!!!

Beautiful wisdom and humor

This is a lovely book filled with beautiful wisdom and humor. Absolutely soul nourishing. Thank you Dr. Gurian, you are a gift.

Nice author but so boring to me!

Kind author. Loves people; all good. Totally monotone. He repeated the same theme over and over. Nothing we don’t know already; ‘try to be yourself and stop worrying about what others think’. I kept waiting for a new concept, a new tip. The stories he told , literally put me to sleep. The author does comedy but is not very funny.

I was expecting something more clinical.

It was ok. I was expecting something more clinical. I wouldn't recommend to anyone with deep rooted issues

Must Read

Very insightful, inspiring, and useful. I had a few good cries. I had a few aha moments.

Too much personal information

This contains more about the author ‘s past hurts, likes and dislikes than anything that was truly helpful.