Review: Guy Finley’s The Essential Laws of Fearless Living: Find the Power To Never Feel Powerless Again.
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(Weiser Books, 185 pages)
By Willa McLean
In “The Essential Laws of Fearless Living”, author, Guy Finley, synthesizes his thirty years of writing, studying, and sharing his message of hope and freedom from fear. He has written 35 best-selling books and audio programs. This book includes specially selected nuggets of truth from previous works and audio albums, as well as special essays never before published.
Each of the forty-one chapters is designed in a step-by-step presentation starting with a Key Lesson and ending with a short, but powerful, summary intended to help you actualize the new principles portrayed.
Finley very evocatively uses parables to portray the ways in which we can be actually possessed by fear and negative thoughts. There is Rebecca, the student-pilot, who literally froze at the controls when confronted by a mountain, until her instructor quietly reminded her to change her altitude- after which she soared safely over the peaks.
Then there is the story of the office-worker whose boss gave him an absent-minded blank look. Within minutes, the man had worked himself into such a state, thinking the boss had it in for him, that he went home and snapped at his family. The lesson here is that we shouldn’t buy into mistaken perceptions but to choose “awareness” of our thoughts.
The next main topic is “success”. Finley makes the point that many wildly-successful executives live with a daily fear of failure. He examines the difference between the kind of success “whose fruit is a fearful life, and that fearless Life that is success itself”.
Finley uses the vivid image of the “Light of higher self-knowledge” to guide us through the book. One of his flat conclusions is that: “There are no dead ends in real life”. We have to liberate ourselves from self-limiting thoughts and feelings. The only thing that feelings of discouragement do is keep you busy doing nothing except feeling sorry for yourself-which ensures you get nowhere. He challenges us to bring the “light” to bear on these thoughts, and they will fade from view.
On page 83, there’s a very insightful chart, ten examples of how we may be sabotaging ourselves while wrongly assuming we’re strengthening our positions with others i.e.: “Fawning before people to win their favor. Explaining ourselves to others”. The key lesson is, “The true individual is one who doesn’t need the approval of others in order to know the peace of mind he finds in being just himself”.
We don’t want to go through life alone, but Finley acknowledges the difficulties of relationships. He includes his four ways of sowing the seeds of a higher relationship with life, taken from his book, “Let Go and Live in the Now”. One of the key rules of Relationships is: “Learn never to blame another for the pain you feel”.
The final two chapters deal with “Being At Peace With Yourself- Be Still and be Free”- and back to Finley’s light analogy, “Be One With The Light of Life”. It’s wisdom to soothe the soul and allow healing into a hurting heart.
Guy Finley ends this inspiring book with his own moving summary:
What is Truth?
But the moment revealed
What is Light?
But God concealed.
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