The Battersea Park Road to Paradise

In her bestseller The Battersea Park Road to Enlightenment, Isabel Losada set out with a modest aim – ‘to be absurdly happy every day’. But a few years down the road, she’s stuck in a pothole. No job (not good). No man (very not good). Nothing has turned out as she’d intended. There’s only one way to get out of the hole: throw out the ideas that landed her there and start over. So, using the ancient Chinese tradition of the five elements of life – Metal, Fire, Wood, Water, Earth – Isabel breaks her own life down to its essentials to explore five areas of inner and outer change. She calls in a feng shui consultant to discover that her bedroom decor is ‘draining the father’ (whatever that means)…takes a motivational workshop to experience the power of ‘doing’…turns a silent meditation retreat into an exercise in unrelenting ‘being’…sits at the feet of a Brixton guru to examine the nature of mind…and undertakes a shamanic ritual in the Amazon to part company with her own mind completely. As rich as the book is in the particulars of a life hilariously lived, it’s also universal: readers can see themselves in Isabel’s experience and look at their lives with new eyes.