Julia Cameron, author of The Artist's Way, has built her books and career from applying the twelve steps (of Alcoholics Anonymous) to creating art and living soulfully.

This is a sort of "Debtors' Anonymous" for the artist set, filled with her signature warmth and her personal meditations on having an abundant heart. ( )

In many ways this is a wonderful book. It explores the many ways one can have a feeling of abundance, which is what we actually want and need more than the money itself, she contends. I agree. She also has a fluid and non-threatening approach to her spiritual components, which I appreciate, having come from a searingly painful Fundamentalist background which makes me allergic to strident religion and dogma. Her exercises for exploring one's relationship to money are excellent, revealing and helpful.

What makes me give this a less than perfect rating is a practical matter, so to speak. The very first thing Cameron recommends (rather insists on) is that her readers immediately stop charging or otherwise incurring debt. This I found impossible to do, and it marred the whole program for me, as she refers to it again and again. If I could simply STOP, why would I need her help? Spenders and Debtors Anonymous also asks its members to stop incurring debt, but it is a goal rather than an immediate requirement, and it is understood that people will make greater or lesser progress as they approach that goal. This made finishing the entire book an impossibility for a long time.

In the end, I do not feel I got out of it what she intended. She would have been better advised to start by instructing readers on just how they might start a program of no more debt, and helping them along the way. In the end, I felt I had not truly accomplished either what the author had in mind or what I myself had hoped for. ( )

The Prosperous Heart, like The Artist's Way, is a twelve week program designed in this case not to recover creativity but rather your financial well-being and, more deeply, your ability to appreciate what you already have.

As Cameron ages, she seems to be retreating ever more deeply into the more mystical aspects of her personal philosophy, which didn't get in the way too much before but unfortunately now mar her work as simplistic faith in a personal God has become a more central focus. Still, many of the principles and practices she espouses are sound enough, from actually keeping track of your expenditures to not going into debt, and the book's fundamental lesson of learning to appreciate the abundance that already surrounds you is one from which many people could greatly benefit.

http://www.amazon.com/review/R2GH0E4PWD6ZNX ( )