Practicing the Art of Becoming
Embracing Risk and Discovering Your Authentic Being
The revealing self-help guide Practicing the Art of Becoming introduces an adaptable methodology of holistic change.
Patty Elvey’s resonant self-help book Practicing the Art of Becoming focuses on broadening perspectives and cultivating inner strengths in the pursuit of personal authenticity.
Drawing on personal insights, this book introduces an adaptable methodology of holistic change. It asserts that through the development of certain qualities and practices, an individual can emerge from a difficult past to work toward a more balanced and integrated future. And it argues that risk—empowered thinking and actions, allowing vulnerability and receptivity, and asking for help and guidance—is pivotal to the art of becoming, which itself requires challenging settled social patterns and expectations.
The book’s tone is expansive and reassuring as it outlines self-improvement tools including integrity, gratitude, perception, and forgiveness. The concept of becoming is defined with clarity, with the book declaring that life is a “dedicated practice,” incorporating acquired experience, emotion, and knowledge. Some familiar self-help techniques, as of utilizing positive affirmations, are also included.
Elvey’s personal story consumes significant space throughout the book, and elements of it are repeated. Still, the related anecdotes are compelling, as with a startling childhood memory used to address the quality of honesty: Elvey recalls witnessing her father’s extramarital affair when she was eight years old, contrasting her fear and confusion then with the hindsight of maturity. Elvey’s mother is also held up as an example of both forgiveness and philanthropy, her generous personality celebrated and given nuance with relations of the challenges she faced as a single parent with seven children. In calibrating her own spiritual “giving compass” years later, Elvey notes, she looked toward her mother’s instinctive “love for humankind” as a representation of true philanthropy.
Beyond its personal elements, the book flows in the manner of guided encouragement, sans summations, informational bullet points, or specific exercises. Its structure is loose, but its work is subtle in a persuasive way, maintaining focus on fostering sincere, expressive connections. There are also passages of evocative and exultant language, as with observations of “elegant” cypress trees that “gracefully reach straight up to the heavens” and assurances to those seeking inner guidance that a “greater truth is always waiting” and that “silent asking will deliver a response.”
Empathetic, revealing, and filled with applicable wisdom, Practicing the Art of Becoming is a heartfelt and inspiring self-help guide that leads by example.
Reviewed by
Meg Nola
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.
