Sitting with the Enemy
  by Sarah Anne Edwards
   a novel of hope and transformation 
   through the Healing Power of Nature 

     Book Review
  Escaping Our Overly-Complicated Lives

  A serendipitous trip to a small mountain village unravels
  the successful lives of a two-career LA couple in this
  engaging story of hope and transformation. In Sitting
  with the Enemy, her first novel, Sarah Anne Edwards
  confronts her readers with some of the most challenging
  paradoxes of our materialistic culture and provides an
  inspiring peek at alternative possibilities.

The pressures of our success-obsessed and perfectionistic world leave many of us exhausted and restless, says Edwards, an LCSW ecopsychologist and co-author of sixteen popular non-fiction books on career and lifestyle change. Driven by a gnawing hunger and relentless pressure to attain more and more, we get trapped in a never-ending cycle of jam-packed schedules, over drawn bank accounts and maxed-out credit cards.

Why do we always feel there’s something missing in our lives despite our material wealth? Why is there never enough time in the day? Why do most of us live in metro areas when we say we’d prefer to live in smaller more natural communities? Why are we more stressed and dis-stressed despite having more of almost everything we say we want?

These are just a few of the questions Edwards addresses in this intriguing ecopsychological drama. She believes the source of peace and serenity we crave is all around us, but too often unnoticed, ignored and slowly disappearing from the landscape of our daily lives. That’s the reality the characters of Sitting with the Enemy face as they struggle to save themselves and their families from becoming casualties of what we’ve come to believe constitutes the progress of success.

We can’t miss what we don’t remember, Edwards points out and since so many of us live in vast metro areas where nature is a trip out of town or a least across town in bumper-to-bumper traffic, we’re losing touch with the incomparable healing powers of nature and the ensuing sense of belonging and community it brings. 

Sometimes subtly and sometimes forcefully, the ensemble cast of characters in Sitting with the Enemy collides with this truth. Together they struggle to overcome the violence, greed, fear and prejudice that keeps us locked in a way of life we yearn to escape.

Readers tell Edwards her novel is reminiscent of the Celestine Prophecy in that it makes powerful statements about how we live and provides a blueprint for how we might change our lives.

Sitting with the Enemy artfully demonstrates how Nature can guide us to the peace and belonging we seek, but only if we’re willing to face the enemy within and among us. Like Edwards’ characters, we must acknowledge our discontent, give it a name and allow Nature and our own natural wisdom to show us how to create new more fulfilling ways to live and work.

 

Sarah Anne Edwards is a best-selling author, LCSW and PhD ecpsychologist. With her husband Paul, she’s written fifteen books on creating more balanced and fulfilling lifestyles, including  The Practical Dreamer’s Handbook, Finding Your Perfect Work and Changing Directions without Losing Your Way. She lives and writes in the Los Padres National Forest.

 

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   A Study Guide on the Healing Power of Nature is available with this novel covering the principles of ecopsychology on which the book is based. 6 CE credits are available to MFTs’, LCSW’s, and RN’s for reading the novel and completing the guide. 

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