'The Seven Keys to Calm' offers readers a very simple but very inspiring seven step program towards choosing calmness over chaos. This program is meant to be useful in dealing with both unnecessary and necessary anxiety. When used over time, it will greatly alleviate superfluous anxiety, enabling us to live more and more in the moment. But it will also ground us during times of actual danger so that we may think clearly enough to extricate ourselves from a perilous situation.
The author, Arlene Modica Matthews is a psychotherapist who developed this program in response to her own life and to the problems of her patients. Again and again she encountered the sort of needless anxiety that eats away at our joy in life which everyone suffers from. The guiding principle of her life and of this book is that we all have an inner core of serenity and peace and we can all learn to access it, regardless of what we think of as our personality or disposition.
The seven keys to calm are clarity, compassion, cycles, crisis, cultivation, contradiction and coincidence.