The Movement for Self-Healing: An Essential Resource for Anyone Seeking Wellness

Rating:
Summary: Packed with exercises which have had proven results
Review: Author Meir Scheider was born blind but was convinced his condition was not permanent: as teen he began to work on eye exercises to reverse his blindness and became able to see over time. His primer on self-healing thus comes from experience and is packed with exercises which have had proven results for arthritis, eye problems, back pain and more.


Rating:
Summary: The Movement for Self-Healing
Review: This marvelous handbook with an unprepossessing cover has as its source of power, a significant number of stories and anecdotes
based on the author's personal experience as a natural healer. There is no stronger force for changing and altering our lifestyle than "been there, experienced that".
Schneider takes us from his early years having been born blind through wonderful tales of wry humor and astute observation of his peers and adults that shows his gifts as an intuitive healer.
The book is easy to follow: divided into three parts with 17 chapters. The author vacillated between despair and hope for many years, and the force of his will, along with the inevitable mentor we have all had at times in our lives led him to open up to the world as his vision emerged. As a senior in high school,
Schneider began teaching others how to recognize the equilibrium and balance that our bodies cry for as we gradually act all too often against our better angels of healthiness.
Living abroad, the author continued to learn and express his own wisdom as he helped others with diseases such as polio, failing vision, back problems, arthritis, even multiple sclerosis and muscular dystrophy. Examining the all-too-human phenomenon of "internal resistance to healing", the author uses case studies, graphic drawings, and repetitive examples to help us gain confidence that we too can alter and adopt the behavior of well-being. For example, Schneider devotes a fair amount of space to the well-known but oft overlooked Bates Method of better vision. But he does not focus on that issue with great technical reliance on medical terminology. Indeed, the value of this fine volume is that the subject matter is dealt with in common sense verbiage: "back problems" are near-universal and the mechanics are often way beyond what most people want to know. Schneider knows his subjects of body movement, natural healing with sleep and time, the use of yoga and its variants, visualization, and support from friends and compassionate healers. Einstein (or Virginia Woolf) would be quite happy with the emphatic clarity of his writing.
This book will be of value to those interested in holistic health (and medicine) as well as Philosophy (mind and body issues). His commentary on ageing, breathing, body imagery, and the need to simply "listen" to ourselves may seem simple expressed in a review, but through the two-page Epilogue of his School's Education Director we come to realize that the Meir Schneider Self-Healing Method is a healthful approach of great quiet authority. The seven-page Index is an excellent tool for referencing Schneider's well laid-out and thoughtful scheme of how some 30 people came to improve their health and stay healthy.

Note: a much-shortened version of this review first appeared in
the Nov/Dec issue of New Age Retailer.