Beautiful Practice: A Whole-Life Approach to Health, Performance and the Human Predicament

by Frank Forencich

Beautiful Practice is a multi-disciplinary guide to the art of living skillfully and mindfully in the modern world. This book will lead you through a progressive series of lessons, each designed to reveal a crucial aspect of living the beautiful adventure of life. Use these lessons to develop a personal practice, refine an existing program or create a new practice from scratch.This book is for trainers, coaches, classroom teachers, yoga teachers, martial artists, professionals, managers and parents; the ideas in this book will enhance your efforts in any discipline.

Genres: Health, Nonfiction

276 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 28, 2014

Reviews

[Jason Lilly · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you're tired of cookie cutter workout routines that aren't working for you or forever-changing diet fads that come and go or make matters worse, this book will open your eyes to the possibility that conventional wisdom about health and fitness has been wrong for a long time.

This is the book Frank Forencich should have written a long time ago.

Organized in a series of lessons, Forencich compiles years of research, tips, and common-sense approaches to living a full and healthy lifestyle. Lessons range from the practical (the importance of movement, practicing self-control, avoiding multi-tasking) to the spiritual (beware false tigers, meditate, spend time with nature, get in rhythm with the universe).

As expected, though, Forencich emphasizes the importance of embracing holistic health in order to reduce stress in our lives. Pulling from scientific and spiritual research, he reminds us that stress may be the number one factor is a long series of modern illnesses and diseases.

Better than Exuberant Animal and more profound in scope than his other works, Frank Forenich's Beautiful Practice is a must read for all who want to take personal health to a new level and possibly live longer (and more disease-free) in the process.

[Maria Withrow · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found that this book states nothing new, but rather reinforces the importance of living a balanced life and causes us to take a critical look at how we go about our daily lives. I really appreciated the facts and research used to back up the importance of living a balanced life and the consequences of stress.

My key takeaways were:
meditate every day and take time to contemplate your completion of tasks. Move more and move fluidly as you do in daily tasks. Get out into nature more and find your inner wild side. Practice self control and breathing to cut down on the negative effects of stress. Do not put yourself in the victim role. Take responsibility and control over your situations. Live in high contrast- work hard and focused, but make time to rest hard and regenerate. Try a new habit every day to build the plasticity of your brain and do the things you wish you could do, even if they're forced in the beginning. These takeaways will help lead you to a life that is balance in all areas like spokes on a wheel. If you're missing a spoke then the wheel is broken and you won't be able to move forward.

[SHARAN GURKAR · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very wholesome book. After reading a few pages, I would always feel great and energized. It did take awhile to read but was well worth it. Frank has a broad depth of information.
Will definitely read again.

[Luke · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very wholesome book which takes time to read but always left me feeling motivated and energised to continue my practice

[July · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful! Such a deep and meaningful approach to practice and life

[Benni Heizmann · Rating 4 out of 5]

Viel Input. Das muss ich zu einem späteren Zeitpunkt nochmals lesen

[FredNagle · Rating 1 out of 5]

The quality of the messages in this book are 5 stars. It's a beautiful book. I could not give the book more than 3 stars due to the amount of errors in the book, on every single page there was a misplaced word or an extra word. It was as if no one proof read it, and if someone did they shouldn't have been paid. Part of the message of this book is to pay attention to everything you do, to do things with quality because everything worth doing is worth doing well with skill and awareness. Unfortunately the amount of mistakes in this book seemed to indicate that the author and/or editor were not living as they were preaching.

Edit: Had to reduce to 1 star. The quality of this book is shocking. Disrespectful to the readers and the practice.