TANYA DE HAAN'S
HOLISTIC HAPPINESS
AT AN AUTHOR FOR ALL SEASONS
Mentone Public Library hosted Tanya De Haan for its September session of An Author for All Seasons Series 12. Caitlin Johnstone introduced the author well, happily listed Tanya’s relevant training, and said the book is for people who want to live a balanced, holistic and happy life in harmony. It contains the 8 secret laws of good health that keep you in balance, simple strategies to access the power within, and proven techniques to maintain good health and rid yourself of negative energy and stress.
Caitln Johnstone left. Tanya De Haan right.
Tanya took the platform with a cheerful demeanor. She told us that being happy in your life requires serious work and is also the natural state of being of a person if they are holistic. She explained the book and said writing the book had helped her as well as others. She told some stories of this. According to Tanya, she designed the book around 22 steps to happiness. She has also made a range of resources related to happiness available. Many of them are free.
What I took on after the event initially, having not finished the book, was that holistic happiness is not just well versus unwell. It is a constant choice to create habits that cause a healthy interaction between the physical person, their inner world and outlook, and the external world. And it gets easier the more you do it. People will note there is more to life than just oneself, but when you want to be happier, you need tools to address what you can change. Her completed book, ‘Holistic Happiness’, centres on many tools and processes that may help you in the journey of being happy. She told how choosing these methods as a disciplinary practice can have a positive impact on your inner and outer world as the journey and outlook becomes a habit, which should start to be seen by around 30-60 days. This results from the methods and your world perspective being shifted.
There is also much to be said about external forces and the wider world, how we choose to interact with it and how external forces affect people’s perspectives. Tanya said she is working on a book about how to engage well with the ‘cosmic’ world around us. She says neither Holistic Happiness nor the ‘cosmic‘ book are “New Age” books, although perhaps the titles borrow from that language. Her research comes from a range of disciplines and cultures.
Tanya spoke about how she got into the mindset of writing the book. Being a graphic designer, she designed a front and back cover for her book with key points she wanted to get across on the back cover. She then stuck the whole thing to another book and moved it around the house as a visual cue as she thought more about it. This process was interesting to me, also as a graphic designer. It is quite a popular tool for inspiring creativity. Once you provide the mind with enough visual cues and other structure, it then follows with more things to go inside that structure.
It was great to hear a wide range of questions from the audience. There were some high validations about the learning, including from a retired medical doctor who said “I certainly have an open mind towards ‘mind over matter' and that there are a lot of processes in the body between body and mind that are not fully understood, but if you can, even by structured processes like this, be made to have better insight and feel more positive/happy… then the rest of the body will take care of itself- you’ll produce fewer stress hormones and your immunity won’t be so depressed from those hormones; you’ve got a better chance of surviving illness and living longer, or whatever your wish might be, so good on you, Tanya.”
There was a positive mood in the room on leaving. It was an interesting and happy event.
Tanya De Haan’s book Holistic Happiness is available to purchase from her website at www.tanyadehaan.com
BLOG PIECE BY NATHANIEL DAVIES
