jprussell | (Reply)

From:

A great intro!
I was always a bit dubious about Seneca, in that I tend to think twice about following advice on how to live your life from people who committed suicide (even though he was ordered to by the emperor).

re: "The other big flaw in a lot of self-help is that it's mostly about solving problems."
So true. I notice you didn't bring up New Thought as an entry point, though to be honest it has a lot (but not all) in common with most modern self-help. I could never really get into it because it starts with the question of "What do you want?" then gives you the practices to achieve that. But my issue is more that I don't really know what I want, and answering that question as: "What I really want is to know what I really want" has a recursive quality that just does not work for me.
I have also looked at one of the surviving correspondence courses of a hermetic bent, but the first 'lesson' included signing an oath that you would implement to the fullest of your ability everything they taught you. Which, coming from a very Northern view of oaths, struck me as a very dangerous thing to do given that I did not know at that stage what they were going to teach! (Or that could just be my paranoid side ;-)
So at the moment I'm working through a German book by Karl Spiesberger that is focussed on the simple practice of runic yoga. Essentially physical work with relaxation and breathing initially, followed by accompanying visualisations. And supplementing it with reading widely (plus experimenting with divination methods.)