Loving Your Life by Elke Scholz, reviewed by Maria Duncalf-Barber

The multi-talented Bracebridge, Muskoka, expressive artist, writer and therapist Elke Scholz has updated and re-published her 2004 book Loving Your Life.

Her previous published edition sold out, and this new edition is more up to date, contemporary in its look and content. Also, she’s added 40 new pages of exercises on life and emotions, illustrations, poetry, and art therapy.

Many books have been written about happiness and self-realization, but Loving Your Life is up there with the best of them. The book invites you to embrace happiness and know yourself.

The key to getting the most out of this book are the exercises. These lead you to an understanding of who you are and who you are becoming, which are the quintessential questions to answer for a life well lived.

Scholz has been on a lifetime journey of education and exploration. She graduated from the Expressive Arts program at Sir Sanford Fleming College, from a three-year intensive program at a private college, ISIS Canada, in Toronto, and she proudly and successfully completed the Masters Honours level for Expressive Arts Therapy at a European Graduate School, Sass Fee Campus in Switzerland.

 “The original book was self-published and sold many copies,” Scholz says. “I was honoured when three years later General Store Publishing House contacted me and said, ‘we want to republish your book.’

“At that time I wasn’t sure. I was busy and I was writing my Masters, but after great thought I said, ‘yes, okay, I’ll do it.’ So I wrote more about the creative passionate living I was learning about and I am extremely happy with the outcome.”

Scholz says that through the arts we can access our true potential. She writes about everything from breathing to journal writing, to developing personal vision, from embracing life and death and mapping your journey on a daily basis to finding happiness.

Scholz encourages us to “slow down this fast paced world” by recreating harmony within and by feeding the soul and savoring the moment, and by using positive thinking and mindfulness to create our own peaceful inner landscape.

Listen to that inner voice, she proclaims. Follow your heart by using all of our five senses with music, drumming, painting art, and writing, poetry as all creative endeavors bring us closer to harmony and peace within.

This book is a well written well illustrated tool, which offers resources to stimulate body, mind and spirit. It enhances education and enables the reader to express emotions and to work through personal issues in a safe, responsible, healing way.

From the beginning of the Breath of Life to Mapping your Life, this book is superb; it tells us that the arts will stimulate the neural pathways in the brain with new perspectives – a wonderful way to learn.

Loving Your Life is available through General Store Publishing here.

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Maria Duncalf-Barber has written everything from short stories to poetry, from book reviews to columns on personal growth. You can read an earlier review of hers here.

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