This is an insightful book that gives me a peace of mind to be able to heal my inner self. I might use the prompts to reflect on a lot of stuff in the future.

I would like to start by saying I am not a professor, therapist or doctor of any kind.

I have read this book twice and I struggled both times. I thought it did talk about holistic medicine and how music can be very helpful in recovery. As a person who has been in a holistic medicine doctor’s care it can be beneficial. I hope to read this a few more times and see if I can get past some of the way things are worded. ( )

I wanted to love this book for so many reasons, however many parts were hard to follow and some areas seemed to be added without research done. It is an okay book but a bit more time put into it could have made it better. ( )

I absolutely loved reading this book. I can relate to so much of it, especially chapter 3 which talks about health and disease as well as chapter 7 which discusses healing. I find this book interesting and unique. Just to note, I am not a therapist. ( )

Please understand that I am not a novice regarding works about spiritual growth and healing. I am familiar with Eastern and Western philosophy, have a master's degree in English, and a law degree. I have even taught philosophy at the college level.

Spirituality 201: Discovering the Inner Healer by Dr. Ivan Figueroa-Otero is a very difficult read for many reasons. I tried my best to understand what the author was trying to convey, because I believe the author has an important message to tell. However, I found myself being hindered by wordiness and unfamiliar jargon. At least five times I would return to the book to reread portions where I had difficulty understanding. I reread the glossary several times to become acquainted with the jargon. But finally I had to come to the conclusion that the book fails in presenting a meaningful message and in engaging the reader to want to keep reading. After trying to understand what was being said, I would often toss the book aside because the effort to understand was not worth the effort. Later I would return hoping that with a fresh look I would understand the message better, only to become frustrated again.

The first distraction was the "Poem" at the beginning of the work. It was distracting because for the life of me, I could not find a single poetic convention evident in the piece. Well, maybe one simile was found. So I spent a lot of time not only trying to discover the poetry in the piece, but also the meaning, which was unclear. I got the gist of the idea, but as a reader, I don't want to guess what the meaning is; I want to know what the meaning is.

Following on the heals of the "Poem," the second distraction was the glossary. The glossary of terms should be at the end of the book, not in front. Reading all the terms only began the confusion, and frankly exhausted me to the point I was forming already a negative view of this work. Of course, I could have ignored reading the terms, but I figured there had to have been a good reason why the author broke all conventions by having the glossary first. What was especially annoying was whenever I referred back to the glossary (very often by the way), I found it very time-consuming, because the entries were not in alphabetical order.

The author states that the book is a self-healing manual for therapists. Perhaps I should not have requested this book to review since I am not a professional therapist. However, since the author is dealing with the subjective part of humans, everyone should be able to benefit from a book about inner healing. Yet the message is lost. There are some helpful suggestions about meditation, but this information is found in hundreds of books and online. It is true that everything is balancing and rebalancing, yet this too is somewhat common knowledge. It is true that what one thinks can affect how one feels physically. Again, common knowledge. I had this feeling that the author must think he is so advanced in his spiritual journey that he did not see the need to make his ideas and good intentions relatable to the rest of us mere mortals in easy to understand English. Somehow we would just have to catch up to his level. Readers will gladly do so, if the information is clear and concise so that it can be applied easily. Hopefully, the author will rewrite the book to be reader-friendly. ( )