Where do personal journeys begin and end? To become a successful, fully-realized search for self, a personal journey commences with the self and completes the circle with the self. In an age where individualism is alternately praised and ridiculed and being 'cloned' is not just a science breakthrough but also a way to gain social acceptance, the search for the self has become more and more important to many of us.

This is where a book called 'The Personal Journey Workbook: A Guide to an Extraordinary Life' becomes an important tool for people about to embark on a personal journey to know themselves and find their purpose in life. The Personal Journey was written as a personal self-help guide to anyone who wishes to change their lives. The workbook offers self-paced lessons based loosely on the teachings.

Opening your mind

The book begins with the evaluation of the user's awareness, of how this can either be a liberated or 'free' form of awareness or limited ('trapped). The reader can use experiences from his own life to evaluate and the workbook will walk him through the lessons to explore the different emotional states associated with those experiences.

The Personal Journey aims to help us overcome our fears, hesitations and negative thinking that keep us from progressing. The lessons and accompanying exercises are provided in a sequence to help the reader do away with restrictive thoughts and emotions. The aim of this book is to create loving and genuine personal transformation that not only enhances creativity but also expands your capacity for self expression.

The approach

You might find the undogmatic lessons included in The Personal Journey Workbook as very accessible and friendly. It will not attack any belief system you may already have but will instead coax you into examining certain preset values and beliefs you might still have that prevent you from learning more about who you truly are and what you want to achieve.

The authors suggest that the best way to use this book is to set aside set patterns of beliefs, archetypes and judgments. They recommend that users should view the personal self help course with a fresh attitude in order to find the uniqueness of your inner experience.

You will also like the fact that the Journey makes use of actual life experiences to help you examine patterns, thoughts and decisions that limit your potential. It's about finding empowerment and the courage to acknowledge a self that is unafraid to become expressed.

A personal journey into our emotions

As a method of exploration, The Personal Journey encourages us to examine the very first things that made us aware of our inner selves: our emotions. The book teaches us that initial reactions are spontaneous. Later, this spontaneity becomes lost to inevitability. In order to create a detailed expression of our feelings, the workbook encourages us to use words carefully chosen to give us a more precise evaluation of certain emotions.