Holistic Life Awareness
The Pathway to Heaven Here and Now
Emphasizing ethical consistency and self-observation, Holistic Life Awareness is a soothing self-help text.
Dragisa Doug Jovanovic’s spiritual self-help book Holistic Life Awareness is about interconnected living and leading a balanced life centered on ethics and mindfulness.
Presenting life as an interconnected system of thought, behavior, health, work, and belief, the book asserts that awareness is the primary lever for change. Such awareness, it suggests, must be applied consistently across domains that are otherwise often treated on an individual basis. Moving between instances of reflection and instruction, the book’s pages combine personal anecdotes with snippets of spiritual philosophy and practical guidance—a constellation of ideas meant to reinforce one another through repetition and variation.
Its first part focused on realization and its second on application, the book first articulates its worldview, which is grounded in unity, ethical responsibility, and spiritual awareness. It then translates such principles into action items in various realms, including related to conduct in business, healing practices, and thought management, moving from the abstract to the concrete. Concepts introduced early in the book are revisited later in applied form, resulting in a looping text.
Indeed, the book’s insistence that separations between one’s inner life and external actions are illusory govern its content and structure so that discussions of economics, health, and personal conduct are framed as extensions of ethical awareness. For example, business decisions are treated as moral acts with consequences that extend beyond profit, while physical illness is examined in relation to mental and emotional patterns.
The book situates problems within a broader system of cause and effect with firm but wearying consistency. Whether it is addressing diet, work, spirituality, or conflict, the same principles are applied. However, related arguments rarely diverge from the established ethical framework.
In addition, the book’s reliance on assertions rather than demonstrations compromises its persuasiveness. Key ideas are presented as self-evident truths, reinforced through repetition instead of analytical development or concrete evidence, limiting depth. Complex topics, including health, economics, and social systems, are flattened in the process, and necessary boundaries between experience-based insights and generalized conclusions are eschewed too often.
Still, the prose is clear and declarative, sans narrative flourishes. Its sentences are assertive and instructional, emphasizing key ideas on repeat at the expense of true progression. Popular quotations are sometimes used to anchor the book’s ideas within established spiritual traditions, as with a reference to the Golden Rule that appears late in the book, but these are infrequent grounding mechanisms. The conclusion, which reaffirms the book’s central premise that awareness is an ongoing practice, is a quiet one.
The spiritual self-help book Holistic Life Awareness introduces an integrated philosophy of mindful living.
Reviewed by
John M. Murray
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
