Book Review: Pushing Upward, Andrea Adler

"Do not allow the daggers of doubt to puncture your heart.  Just let them bounce off you like pellets of water" - Pushing Upward

Sandra Billings is a young, talented and naive, beautiful actress whose career has not quite taken off yet.  She is the fool, on her hero's quest.  It is 1974 and young Sandra, a drama student  in what many would call "a stroke of luck" has just been evicted from her apartment and lost her job too!  In a panic, she searched her soul for an answer, a solution to her circumstance ... a victim of life she was ... Sandra the fool!  Feeling powerless and uncertain, she meditates on her problem ... and as by divine fate ... an answer appears.  She complements her genius, as a true drama student would and we are taken on a transformational journey along side Miss Sandra Billings. 

This is one of the most heart-touching, inspirational and interesting books that I have ever read.  It is so unique, so original.  Laced with the author's own experiences of being an actress, journalist and spiritual women, the reader is welcomed into a world of theater and an emotional roller coaster of the drama of Sandra's inner and outer life. 

Emotionally underdeveloped, insecure, vain, inpatient, angry and confused ... Sandra growth takes place through the many people that she meets, none more touching than the spiritually rich, classy and poised, intuitive elderly women Emma whose heart Sandra touches more than once. 

Sandra consults the I-Ching, always accurate, yet she chooses to listen only when she wants to ... she soon realizes that the coins that are thrown, an extension of her energies ... must be listened to, respected as the seed whose potential must push upward to sprout growth, so too must the aspirant push themselves to reach the divine potential the exists within us all.

The climatic end is rewarding, as an unexpected turn brings Sandra to a deeper place of knowing and she steps through the gateway of her world that will never be the same.  Neither will mine!

I could not put this book down, I read it twice.  I had to be with Emma, a little longer ... place her deeper in my heart!  I highly recommend this book!!!

I received the book from Hay House for review purposes.  The opinions are completely my own, based on my personal experience.