Subtitle: The Absolutely Indispensable Next Step for Freeing Yourself from the Monster of the Mind
Rick Carson’s prior book Taming Your Gremlin was transformative for me. “Simply notice” and “Play with options” have become touchstones in my own process.
Based on the title and subtitle of this book, I had high expectations.
Those expections would have been better met if the title were “A Followup Seminar in Gremlin-Taming.” It gathers a series of informative articles on the topic, offering useful techniques in a commanding style. I would dispense with the subtitle altogether.
Advice for clear communication with yourself or others:
- Simply Notice
- Describe
- Hush
- Breathe
- Listen
I like “Hush” as the middle step. It includes an expectant silence, as well as ceasing to speak. It evokes the natural world at evening for me, too.
Some types of disrespectful communication:
- Overexplaining
- Talking about someone instead of talking to him/her
- Rushing to share a parallel experience
- Interrupting
- Habitual lateness
- Not returning phone calls or emails within 24 hours
- Not acknowledging acts of kindness
- Avoiding eye contact
- Mumbling
- Fidgeting
- Jumping to conclusions
- Being phony
- Sarcasm
- Doing more than one thing in any breath’s worth of time
- Asumming tha tthere is an unalterable truth and that you are the bearer of it
- Huffing, puffing, and rolling of eyes
- Inflection and intonation that implies that your comment could well end with “Stupid,” even though you’re not saying it
- Spinning on one’s heels, storming off, and slamming doors and/or cabinets.
Seeing overexplaining at the top of that list was validating for me, since I’d just had several encounters with Overexplainers. At the same time, some of the list reads like a letter from a frustrated parent to a teenager.
The most useful tip for me was to accentuate what is already happening. Make those shoulders even more tight, rather than trying to make them open and relax. It’s a great way to stop fighting what is.
I highly recommend the first book, Taming Your Gremlin. Pick this one up for some extra tips, and a few stories from Rick Carson’s life.
Available at Powell’s Books.
Subtitle: Using Acceptance and Commitment Therapy to Heal from Post-Traumatic Stress and Trauma-Related Problems
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (abbreviated ACT, and pronounced as a whole word) invites clients to observe their own behaviors and let go of strategies which might be keeping them from living their most valued life. It includes a strong emphasis on mindfulness and compassion.
ACT assumes that trying to suppress or escape pain can generate more suffering. Paradoxically, facing pain and accepting it can be the best strategy to ease the pain.
This substantial workbook offers theory, illustrations, stories, metaphors, and exercises to help the reader observe existing strategies around pain, establish values, and choose strategies that move toward those values.
The book assumes that the reader is highly avoidant. Since we all use avoidance in overt or covert ways, it can be helpful for many of us.
My favorite metaphor from the book: You’re blindfolded, and one day you fall in a deep hole. All you have is a shovel, so you start digging. You dig to the right, to the left, and even under your feet, but you’re still in the (enlarged) hole. Eventually, even if someone brought you a ladder, you would think it was a different sort of shovel. Suggestion: put down the shovel and just stop digging.
Putting down the shovel looks different for each person. We all have our favorite strategies that work up to a point, but then we keep depending on them long after they’re just making things worse. The shovel contains all our current working assumptions. Putting down the shovel is a leap of faith into new assumptions.
One of my shovels is wondering what I’m doing wrong in any given situation. Before I put it down, it feels like a radical, risky act. After I put it down, it’s a huge relief.
Another useful metaphor: willingness is like jumping. We can say we’re jumping, we can think about jumping, we can try to jump, but either we’re jumping or we’re not. We can’t half-jump.
Willingness to change is similar. It is important to check whether we’re actually willing to make a change, and choose changes that are small enough that we are willing to risk them.
The book describes unwillingness in willingness’s clothing. One of many examples: “After experiencing a loss, I tried to accept it so that I could stop feeling so sad.”
There are many more useful metaphors and exercises in this book. I highly recommend it for anyone healing from trauma, or helping others heal.
Available at Powell’s Books.
I received this book, originally published in 1935, with a childhood gift of six classic Young Adult novels. I’ve carried the set from home to home ever since, but hadn’t reread any of the books in many years.
Before I send the set off to my niece and nephew, I decided to reread “National Velvet,” since the image of Velvet struggling with her unruly stomach had been coming to mind.
I remembered the essence of the book – horse-mad young Velvet rides and wins a steeplechase race – but had forgotten most of the details, including that the story takes place in England.
The writing is gorgeously evocative. Here is the opening paragraph:
Unearthly humps of land curved into the darkening sky like the backs of browsing pigs, like the rumps of elephants. At night when the stars rose over them they looked like a starlit herd of divine pigs. The villagers called them Hullocks.
I paused there in my reading to imagine the Hullocks, reminded of a village I visited in southern England, ensconced in a narrow valley dropping to the sea.
It turns out that Velvet grows up in just such a village with her three older sisters, much younger brother, solid parents, and butcher’s assistant Mi Taylor. Their cramped living quarters are attached to her father’s slaughterhouse. Mi lives in an outbuilding, and their old horse has a rickety barn.
The girls seem young for their ages by modern standards. At fourteen, Velvet prances about pretending to ride paper horses. Her seventeen year old sister has her first beau. The girls can ride alone for miles among the Hullocks, but their mother tells them what to wear to the village fair. The family shares few words but much love.
I recommend reading this book for the layered details of village life and relationships. I was less interested in the wish-come-true plot, although to be fair I’m considerably older than the target audience of the book. There are sub-themes about news and fame and innocence which provide food for thought.
Available at Powell’s Books.
Subtitle: How Overwhelming Experience Shatter You… And What You Can Do About It
Recommended by: Larisa Koehn
In this book, Stephanie Mines introduces and advocates for her approach to healing named Jin Shin Tara. It is derived from Jin Shin Jyutso, a gentle form of acupressure.
She defines shock as severe trauma, and then claims that from conception onward, we are all exposed to shocks (severe traumas). She separates sympathetic shock (stuck in activity) from parasympathetic shock (stuck in passivity).
Anecdotes from her own life and from clients demonstrate dramatic, immediate results from Jin Shin Tara.
Detailed instructions are given for applying Jin Shin Tara to oneself and others. There are correspondences between points on the body and emotional states, chakras, and seasons of the year. Specific points are also recommended for each month of gestation during a pregnancy.
Stephanie Mines’ mission is to increase awareness of the vulnerable time before, during, and just after birth, and minimize shock (severe trauma) at those times in order to reduce the amount of violence in the world.
There is a lot of useful information in this book, and I enthusiastically support the mission of reducing shock and trauma in the world.
At the same time, I am wary of simplified approaches to complex experiences. Jin Shin Tara is presented as being universally applicable with guaranteed results. I prefer a more balanced, nuanced approach. I think it is useful to differentiate between severe trauma and the more daily bumps and shocks we all experience.
Read more about Stephanie Mines’ approach to healing at her website.
Available at Powell’s Books.
Subtitled “A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage,” this is a sequel to Eat, Pray, Love.
I was expecting an exploration of emotional commitment as detailed as the exploration of transformation, self-discovery, and healing in Eat, Pray, Love. Instead, Committed documents the political institution of marriage.
In Linchpin, Seth Godin mentions that Elizabeth Gilbert printed out the first completed draft of this book, read it, threw it away, and started over. He used it as an example of lacking the commitment to shipping a completed work.
In her introduction to Committed, Gilbert mentions that she had trouble finding her writing voice after Eat, Pray, Love became a bestseller, and that she threw away the first draft because the voice was too distant, not recognizable as her own voice. I’m glad she had the commitment to her own voice and the courage to start over in that case, especially since I still see some distance in the book she did ship.
The book contains engaging personal stories about the author, her extended family, and some of the people she encounters in her travels. It also contains generalizations about “tribal” Hebrews vs. “intellectual” Greeks, and a shallow historical overview of the institution of marriage.
I’m glad to know what happened next in the relationship between Elizabeth and Felipe, and wish them the best in their new home.
Available at Powell’s Books.
Despite the intimidating cover, this book is filled with compassionate, practical suggestions for getting a marketing program off the ground.
Getting clients is divided into four stages:
- Filling the pipeline
- Following up
- Getting presentations
- Closing sales
For the 28 day program, the book recommends focusing on a single stage, and committing to a set of 8-10 daily or weekly actions from a menu of suggestions. The actions include both direct marketing and incremental work on longer-term “Success Ingredients” such as a brochure or website.
There are helpful sections on choosing realistic goals and managing resistance when it inevitably arises. As well as choosing activities, you choose a Special Permission, such as “I have permission to ask for what I want” or “I deserve to be successful.”
Worksheets for choosing a program and tracking progress can be downloaded at the Get Clients Now website.
For myself, I find that I need more flexibility than this intense 28-day program provides, but the structured approach makes marketing seem a lot less mysterious. It is reassuring to see how many of the “success ingredients” I’ve created along the way, and how many of the recommended activities I’ve incorporated into my marketing, even if I don’t do 8 of them per day.
Available at Powell’s Books.
Recommended by: Reading Barbara Kingsolver’s past books.
“The Lacuna” is both epic and personal, ranging across countries and decades and historic events, and also documenting the details of a child’s life.
The point-of-view character, Harrison William Shepherd, is unwanted by his father and only haphazardly cared for by his alcoholic self-centered mother. The book starts on a remote Mexican island in 1929, where young “Will” (his mother uses his middle name) and his mother are trapped with a rich man she hopes will marry her.
Will connects with Leandro, the native cook, who happily teaches him cooking skills in exchange for his help in the kitchen. Starting a matter-of-fact theme through the book, Will has a crush on him, but doesn’t reveal it. Leandro is young enough to be called “cook boy”, but old enough to be married with children.
Leandro gives Will swim goggles, and he discovers the wonders of the tropical ocean. He also finds a lacuna – a hole – an undersea tunnel that opens into hidden Aztec ruins. During the full moon, the tides help him get through on one breath.
Will starts keeping a journal, filling notebooks with his observations and stories. In another layer of plot, the book itself is supposedly compiled from the notebooks by “VB”.
Will and his mother escape from the island to Mexico City via another of his mother’s affairs. He spends two years back in a US boarding school, where his father calls him Harry. “Whoever pays the bill names the boy.”
Back in Mexico City, Harry joins the household of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, as cook, secretary, driver, and friend. There, they call him yet a third name, Soli, because they can’t pronounce Harrison. Lev Trotsky, on the run from Stalin, comes to stay with them.
In the aftermath of Trotsky’s assassination, Harry goes back to the US once again, and discovers his father has died, leaving him a car. He simply starts driving, and settles in Asheville, North Carolina, where the Blue Ridge Parkway unceremoniously ended.
He takes up writing at last, successfully publishing two novels set in the Mexican past, but is eventually hounded by the House Un-American Activities Committee and convicted of being a Communist. He escapes back to Mexico.
“VB” is revealed to be his secretary and help-meet in Asheville, Violet Brown.
The book is filled with layers of historical research. I learned about Mexican history, Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Lev Trotsky, the American Depression, and the anticommunist movement.
However, I didn’t engage with the characters. The historical figures feel remote, and even Harry refers to himself in third person as the cook, or driver. He doesn’t make contact with his own emotions. As I read, I wondered what lesson or point I was supposed to be taking in.
Available at Powell’s Books.
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.
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