Recommended by: Seth Godin’s blog
Seth Godin brings together several of his ideas about how to survive in our changed economy. His main premise is that non-thinking “factory” work is no longer the road to security. “Factory” is in quotes because he uses it to include any job which involves following the rules and doing what the boss says.
He redefines several other words, including “art” (a gift that changes the recipient), and “artist” (someone who gives such gifts in a business context).
I love his idea of “emotional work”, which is one of the possible ways to make “art.” Emotional work includes both confronting ones own resistance, and creating genuine connections with others. I know I’m much more likely to frequent a shop where the employees or owners give me the gift of emotional connection.
Which brings us to his main definition, “linchpin”: someone who does their emotional work, creates art, gives that little bit extra to both coworkers and customers, and becomes essential to a business.
He talks at length about the importance of “shipping” - completing the art or product and sending out into the world - and the “lizard brain” or resistance that gets in the way. This was the most problematic redefinition for me, because he makes it clear that he’s referring to the amygdala and limbic system, which evolved in mammals, not reptiles.
While it’s useful to think of resistance as a separate voice and notice what it’s saying without letting it take over, I was uncomfortable with the dismissive, combative attitude he seemed to be promoting. I’m more comfortable with the compassionate attitude in Cheri Huber’s How to Get From Where You Are to Where You Want to Be, which I happened to be reading at the same time.
The writing is choppy, reminiscent of his pithy, paragraph-long blog posts. I read his blog with interest every day, but find the style distracting in a full book.
Seth Godin has also published the book’s ideas in a freely available PDF.
Available at Powell’s Books.
In connection with reading Being Bodies, I tracked down this book. It turns out I’d read it a long time ago and remembered many of the stories, although I’d forgotten their source.
Cheri Huber herself admits that the title is a bit of a trick. Rather than trying to move from Here to There, she advocates giving careful attention to Here, since that’s all there ever is.
She shares harrowing vignettes from her own life with a “that’s just how it is” tone. Her quest for meaning and peace led her to Zen meditation, where she encountered the simple instructions to sit in full lotus and count breaths up to 10, and then begin again.
Desperate for change, she sat in full lotus for hours, and counted breaths no matter what she was doing. After counting breaths during a 10-hour drive, she finally encountered the peace of the present moment. In time, she joined a Zen monastery, started teaching, and went on to found her own Zen center.
Woven with her own journey, she introduces gentle steps for becoming aware of social conditioning and self-hatred, and easing the grip of the resistance they cause. After each exercise, she implores “Please do not allow conditioning to use your awareness against you.”
For example, she introduces meditation by suggesting: Take three full breaths. What did you notice? Do it again. There, you’re meditating! I follow these non-instructions in my own meditation practice. Fortunately, full lotus position is optional!
She summarizes the steps for true, gentle change:
- Choose an issue you want to work with.
- Sit down, stay still, and be aware of all that goes on.
- Notice what belief systems are held in place with this issue.
- Notice which subpersonalities [and/or defense mechanisms] are involved.
- Listen to what the [internal judging] voices have to say about the issue about who you are for having it.
- Become aware of the projections made onto yourself and others because of this issue.
- Explore the emotions that keep this issue real.
- Find out where the issue is held in your body - where is the epicenter?
- Practice disidentifying by moving your focus of attention away from the issue and returning it to the breath.
- Remember to do this - and everything you do - in a context of compassionate acceptance of all that is.
She shares stories from her students’ journeys as well. One man at a Zen retreat became angry about a dirty mop bucket left on the steps, and each day muttered to himself, “Someone should do something about that!” Finally he realized that he was “someone” and cleaned the bucket.
This book is full of treasures. I recommend it to anyone looking for compassionate suggestions about how to find center and self-acceptance.
Available at Powell’s Books.
Recommended by: Robert Sutton blog post (via Twitter)
It’s a rare business book that focuses on warmth, kindness, and peaceful, loving environments. This compassionate little book, subtitled Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t, does so with clarity and conviction.
In this book, you’ll find:
- A definition of assholes (also known as jerks, bullies, tyrants, etc.)
- The costs of employing them
- How to implement and enforce a “no asshole” rule, including heartening positive examples
- How to avoid behaving badly ourselves, including a self-test
- Survival tips for unavoidable asshole-ridden situations
- What people get out of behaving badly
The main message:
Treat the person right in front of you, right now, in the right way.
I am delighted to discover that some corporations and academic departments value respect and kindness. I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to follow their example.
Available at Powell’s Books.
Recommended by: Ursula Le Guin
In contrast to Tove Jansson’s kind, easygoing, whimsical Moomintrolls, the humans in The True Deceiver are hard-edged, uneasy, complicated.
Yellow-eyed young Katri Kling and her “simple” younger brother Mats are orphans in a blue-eyed Finnish village. Katri fights for survival through observation and analysis, noting her fellow villagers’ hostility towards her and each other. She is also meticulously honest, seeking detached, pure clarity.
Her neighbors both resent her and come to her for advice, receiving fair solutions that nevertheless encourage negative views of each other.
Even with her awkward contempt of social politeness, Katri manages to befriend local heiress and author Anna Aemelin. She successfully arranges to move herself and her brother into Anna’s house, and becomes Anna’s business manager as well.
Anna is vaguely friendly to everyone. Katri challenges her world by showing her how she is taken advantage of at every turn.
In the end, both Katri’s and Anna’s approaches to life are thrown into question. Elderly Madame Nygard, whose warm kitchen still holds an old-fashioned wood-burning stove, seems to offer a kinder but still observant middle ground.
This is not a feel-good book. It accurately portrays the cruelty that can result from desperation and isolation in a claustrophic environment. The ending holds ambiguous hints of change, but doesn’t resolve the tension.
I want the focus to be wider, to show reasons in the past or healing in the future. In this single winter moving into spring, Katri seems trapped without access to her own heart.
Available at Powell’s Books.
Recommended by: Catherine Holmes Clark, who also has a detailed site about her journey with environmental illness.
The sweet relief of reading about Buddhism from the perspective of women connected with their bodies took me by surprise. Until I read this book, I didn’t realize how much I’d been reading around a feeling of exclusion in The Wise Heart by Jack Kornfield and other books about Buddhism centered on male experience.
Thirty-three essays by different Buddhist women are divided into five sections:
- Body as Suffering - bringing awareness to the experience of chronic illness.
- Body as Nature - the feeling of failure because giving birth brought pain, even with awareness.
- Body as Gender - helping a daughter remain aware as she navigates adolescent self-judgment of her body.
- Body as Vehicle - dealing with difficulties through “no more struggle,” “using poison as medicine,” and “seeing whatever arises as enlightened wisdom.”
- Body as Self - navigating addiction to alcohol, compulsive eating, and the loneliness of being embodied.
Images from the essays have woven themselves into my awareness.
At my cutting board chopping carrots or parsnips, I think of Darlene Cohen’s essay, “The Only Way I Know of to Alleviate Suffering.” She writes about helping people with arthritis discover that they can cut carrots by bringing their awareness to the details of their bodies’ experience with the board, the knife, and the carrots.
I recommend this book to anyone who wants to revel in the Buddhist perspective of women connected to their bodies.
Available at Powell’s Books.
Recommended by: a client.
Geneen Roth has written several books about overcoming compulsive eating by removing external rules around food and listening to one’s own body instead. She also talks about the source of compulsive eating - not an internal lack of control, but a survival strategy to overcome the lack of external control in childhood.
In this book, she talks about her own history with intimacy, and the connections between how we treat food, and how we treat emotional connections in our lives. She reveals the neglect and emotional and physical abuse of her childhood, and shares stories from her “Breaking Free” workshops as well.
If you deeply explore one area of life, you will find the answers to every area. What you learn as you break free from your obsession with food is what you need to learn about intimacy:
Commit yourself.
Tell the truth.
Trust yourself.
Pain ends and so does everything else.
Laugh easily.
Cry easily.
Have patience.
Be willing to be vulnerable.
When you notice that you are clinging to anything and it’s causing trouble, drop it.
Be willing to fail.
Don’t let fear stop you from leaping into the unknown, or from sitting in dark silence.
Remember that everything gets lost, stolen, ruined, worn out, or broken; bodies sag and wrinkle; everyone suffers; and everyone dies.
No act of love is ever wasted.
The book is full of vivid metaphors and urgent truths. It is a call to turn inside, face one’s demons with gentleness and compassion, and find freedom.
Available at Powell’s Books.
I liked How To Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk so much that I read the authors’ prior book.
“Liberated Parents, Liberated Children” was published first, by many years. It tells the story of how the authors and a group of other parents (fictionalized to protect privacy) learned respectful, compassionate communication and boundary skills from Dr. Haim Ginott.
Over 5 years, they and their families were transformed.
The skills (summarized below) are the same in both books. This book highlights each parent’s journey as they struggle to learn how to honor their children’s feelings, and their own feelings as well. They share both immediate successes and frustrating stumbles. Their dedication to finding a better way shines through the pages.
I am grateful to them for persevering, and for publicizing what they learned. I am grateful to Dr. Haim Ginott for creating these skills, and teaching them. I am grateful to all the parents out there dedicated to learning a better way. I wish my parents had had this kind of dedication and support.
From the book’s inside cover:
Find out how the mood in your home can change when you respond:
To crying with: “A scratch can hurt.”
(Instead of “Stop crying. It’s only a scratch.”)
To accidents with: “The milk spilled. We need a sponge.”
(Instead of “Now look what you did!”)
To misbehavior with “Walls are not for writing on. Paper is for writing on.”
(Instead of “Bad boy! No more crayons for you!”)
To messiness with: “It would be really helpful if you would put the juice back in the fridge.”
(Instead of “Why can’t you ever clean up after yourself?”)
To rudeness with “You really hate it when Aunt Harriet pinches your cheek.”
(Instead of “You’re making a big fuss over nothing. Aunt Harriet loves you.”)
To whining with: “It’s really hot for you in here, isn’t it?”
(Instead of “How can you feel hot? It’s cool in here.”)
To carelessness with: “Kids, the door’s open!”
(Instead of “Shut the door! What’s wrong with you?”)
To sibling fighting with “You two are really angry with each other. Why don’t you each write down what happened.”
(Instead of “I don’t care who started it! I just want it ended!”)
Highly recommended to anyone who wants to interact more peacefully and successfully with outer or inner children.
Available at Powell’s Books.
Recommended by: a friend in Tifton, GA.
Janie Hopwood creates a colorful panorama of characters and events in this historical novel about her grandmother Rena Beck’s boarding house.
When Rena Beck’s husband died, leaving her a house but nothing else, she decided to take in boarders in order to provide for herself and her three unmarried daughters. With courage, perseverance, help from family members, and a lot of hard work, she built a successful business which operated for many years.
I recommend this book for historical details, depth of characterization, laugh-out-loud dialogue, and a sure touch with stories about hard times.
The book is self-published through Indigo Publishing, and this article is all I found online. You’ll need connections in Tifton to get a copy.
Recommended by: Spirituality bookgroup, and several others.
Lynne Twist recounts her fundraising for The Hunger Project non-profit, including anecdotes about her encounters with both desperately poor and despairingly wealthy people.
She also shares her own journey from oblivious, superficial spending to heart-centered use of funds.
She explores the effects of our toxic myths of scarcity (there’s not enough, more is better, that’s just the way it is), and replaces them with sufficiency.
Sufficiency is defined as a declaration that there is enough, and we are enough. “We engage in life from a sense of our own wholeness rather than a desperate longing to be complete.”
In sufficiency, money flows through our lives, rather than being accumulated for its own sake. We use money with integrity to express value, rather than allowing it to determine value. Turning our attention to inner resources allows us to meet challenges of external scarcity. “In the nourishment of our attention, our [internal] assets expand and grow.”
I had never thought of fundraising as offering someone the opportunity to align their actions with their values. This new model changes the power dynamic from giver/receiver to an equal exchange.
It was encouraging to notice that I already follow one of the book’s major recommendations: aligning my spending with my values. I still have the goal of becoming more comfortable with the flow of money in my life.
Available at Powell’s Books.
Recommended by: Tess Alfonsin
A hard-edged book for teens that takes on multiple tough issues:
- Children’s cruelty to each other for being fat or disfigured
- What it’s like to grow up fat or disfigured
- Surviving parental abuse and abandonment
- Abortion
- Hypocrisy
- Religious intolerance by some Christians
While I applaud the author’s courage in addressing all these important issues, I think the book would have been stronger with at least one fewer sub-plot and more attention to characterization. The major teen characters showed some complexity, but the adults were either all-good or all-bad.
I was caught up in the plot and characters until the book suddenly turned into a thriller with a violent climax. I felt tricked into reading something far more violent than I expected or enjoyed.
I’m glad teens are reading and thinking about all the issues in this book. I wish the issues weren’t packaged with a violent, all-good/all-bad wrapper.
Available at Powell’s Books.
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