Inward Bound: Exploring the Geography of Your Emotions

By Sam Keen

Book Overview

The author of the New York Times bestseller Fire in the Belly guides us on an enlightening journey across the emotional landscape of our own inner psyches. Using self-tests and practical advice, Inward Bound teaches us to master the art of emotional literacy--how to understand what our minds and bodies are really telling us through the ups and downs of our emotions. Paying special attention to "negative" emotions such as fatigue, depression, grief, and especially boredom--the undiagnosed disease from which most "normal" people suffer--Sam Keen shows us how the low periods in our lives can actually be the impetus for the most profound and lasting change. While most people deny emotional lows in the hopes that they will go away; eat, drink, or tranquilize themselves; take mood elevators; or otherwise fill their time with empty activities, Keen instead teaches us how to re-vision negative emotions as positive way stations on the path to self-discovery. In Inward Bound , Keen shows us how to recover the full spectrum of our feelings and points the reader on a journey to greater health, intimacy, vitality, and a renewed joy in life.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0553353888
• ISBN13: 9780553353884
• Release Date: May 1992
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Length: 244 Pages
• Weight: 0.56 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Pure Keen: Delightful read, unique insights

There isn't a book of Keen's I haven't earmarked and high-lined to a frazzle. A delight to read if only for literary style, sense of humor, metaphor and unique turn of phrase, Keen's books add unique, yet (once pointed out) obvious insights into our individual and collective soul. He has a knack for spotting the elephant in (or heading for)our living rooms, the one the rest of us put off, avoid, dismiss, deny and stonewall. Reading Keen for me is like a simultaneous shot of Jung/Chopra/Rollo May along with a light dose of Carlin. I've often wondered why Keen's books aren't better read and why he isn't a hot property on the talk show, PBS documentary or speaker circuit. Could it be that his bestseller "Fire in the Belly" was the mother load of political incorectness? I do clearly recall disparaging remarks about the book and it's author by people who obviously had not read it. Perhaps it is because his books are often difficult to get through--not because they are difficult to read--but because they are too well written. I often find myself rereading paragraph or pages because I've been so involved with the cleverness of the writing that I've lost the message underneath. Like all his books, Inward Bound is a unique look at our emotions, unique because Keen seems to suggest we abandon that victim mode we all seem to slip into these days and recognize that instead of the clinical and justifiable depression we see lurking around every corner, we might be simply boring ourselves to death. Worse, Keen actually suggests we step into our boredom, accept it, examine it, welcome it out in the open where we can take a good look at it, work with it. Imagine that. Take responsibility for it. Why would we want to do that, we might ask, when we can simply digest a tub of prozac instead?

A huge relief?

It took me a while, as I read this book to think of why I kept getting this warm feeling about my life as I turned the pages. . . You have to read it! You don't have to DO it, but you have to READ IT!I learned about myself at a whole, new level. I found out about things within myself that I really knew nothing about. The examples of others and their experiences were often so close to some of my own feelings in similar situations, that I kept getting the feeling that the book was written just for me, right now!Shawn Honnick