Love Birds in a Cage

The author, Steve Oliver and I like to exchange ideas, mostly on health, healing, and wellness. We also both share a deep passion for Asian approaches to these ideas. Over these past few years, it seems that our respective ideas have grown by leaps and bounds, so much so that it has become imperative that we put these ideas down in print, so that they may be shared more readily with a steadily increasing audience / readership. So, when Steve asked me if I would be willing to write a foreword to a book he was writing on ideas that bring together meditation, mind and body relationship, and keys to happiness and success, my response was an enthusiastic “yes”. A book such as this is of such great value, that I consider it both an honor as well as a sense of devotion to extol its overall content.
This book is a wonderful celebration of many practical approaches to making one’s life more meaningful and enjoyable at the same time. It offers time-tested methods to bring about significant positive changes in the way one thinks, acts, and perceives. It is also a unique contribution to an evolving paradigm of the human experience here on Earth – it combines the rich knowledge base of several life-enhancing techniques and applies this knowledge in pragmatic, logical, and practice-friendly ways.
This book is impressive in itself, but once you realize that it is but the first in a series of ten books, all dealing with the many facets of our humanness, it quickly becomes obvious that Steve Oliver has undertaken a herculean task of equipping the reader with a vast body of wisdom to be able to overcome some the most basic challenges and difficulties one faces in a lifetime. Because of the sheer magnitude of this endeavor, readers will be astonished by the book’s depth and complexity, and yet all the while, its relative ease of application. This quickly becomes evident by the author’s input of many interesting personal accounts and illustrations of his own journey to “wisdom and wellness”.
Possibly the greatest challenge Steve faced in writing this work was to creatively intermesh the many intellectual currents, both historical and more contemporary, that inform the broad theme encompassed in this book. As the first in a series, it contains the essence of crucial concepts and effective practices to bring the reader to a level of empowerment, self-assuredness, and optimism in one’s own inherent abilities to bring significant improvements, to experience a leap in quality of life, one that will not leave anyone indifferent once it has been thoroughly read.
This is a remarkable book, becoming an indispensable reference source of inspiration and guidance to all those who aspire to make “things better for themselves”.
For all of us who can so greatly benefit from this valiant effort, Steve Oliver deserves the deepest gratitude.
Charles Beaupé
Associate Professor
Asian Studies
Saint Mary’s University
Halifax, Nova Scotia
Canada