Curious, Healing

Books about healing, business, and fun

nonfiction

“Riding Between the Worlds” by Linda Kohanov

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My response to The Tao of Equus doesn’t begin to express the impact it had on me. I immediately looked for Kohanov’s next book.

Riding Between the Worlds contains less abstract theory and more stories from clients and from her own life. It also contains a helpful adaptation of Karla McLaren’s work with emotions into an Emotional Message Chart.

For example:

Emotion Message Questions to Ask Intensification
Anger Proper boundaries should be maintained or rebuilt.

Incongruence.

 What must be protected?

What must be restored

What is the emotion behind the mask, and is it directed toward me?

 Rage, fury (exploding at those who’ve violated our boundaries)

Shame, guilt (anger toward self when we’ve violated others’ boundaries)

Boredom, apathy (masks anger that can’t be dealt with – a nonviolent coping strategy

Kohanov validates my experiences with transmission of emotions from one person to another, describing the many ways that happens with both people and horses in her practice.

She also talks extensively about congruence and how important it is to both horses and sensitive humans. Incongruence, a mismatch between what someone is feeling and expressing, can cause trouble both for the incongruent person who is suppressing feelings, and the beings around them who may be the target of deception or explosive release.

Kohanov also presents her hard-won list of skills for building community:

  1. Using emotion as information.
  2. Sitting in uncomfortable emotions without panicking.
  3. Sensing and flowing with the emotions of others, again without panicking.
  4. Reading “misbehavior” as a form of communication.
  5. Understanding the dynamics of shared emotion: distinguishing between instructive personal feelings, conditioned (False Self) emotional patterns, affect contagion, empathy, ambience, and emotional resonance.
  6. Resisting the temptation to aggressively “fix” people, horses, uncomfortable situations, etc.
  7. Creating a psychological container of support, what Kathleen Ingram calls “holding the sacred space of possibility.” This fully engaged form of patience is crucial to tapping innovative solutions that arise from the eighth ability:
  8. Activating the Authentic Self.

The only sour note in the book occurs when she creates a false sense of suspense by telling half a story and then inserts 30 pages of other material before returning to the story.

Highly recommended for anyone who believes they are too sensitive or too emotional.

Available at bookshop.org.

“Hand Wash Cold” by Karen Maezen Miller

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Subtitle: Care Instructions for an Ordinary Life

Recommended to me by: Shambhala Sun excerpt.

Miller is a Zen Buddhist priest and teacher. This memoir is organized around three household tasks as metaphors for Zen living – laundry, dishes, and gardening. I enthusiastically agree with the premise that household maintenance is an integral part of life, rather than something to be suffered through or outsourced.

At the same time, I had trouble warming to this tale of unhappy high-powered businesswoman in one marriage turned Zen stay-at-home mom in another. She says about the second, current marriage: “No, ours is not a marriage of friends making nice. … Ours is a marriage of adversaries making peace.” I’m glad that works for her. I don’t think it would work for me.

I did like her take on parenting: “There is no right way to parent; only a right-now way. … Children always show us the present moment unfolding.”

Available at bookshop.org.

“The Tao of Equus” by Linda Kohanov

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Subtitle: A Woman’s Journey of Healing and Transformation through the Way of the Horse

Recommended to me by: A client.

Linda Kohanov and her herd of sensitive horses offer equine facilitated psychotherapy. Together they help both horses and humans recover from trauma, regain their balance, and treat each other with more respect.

This many-layered book contains autobiography, horse stories, client case studies, myths, theories about emotions and the brain, and diatribes about traditional horse training.

Kohanov convincingly claims that horses are intelligent partners, extraordinarily capable of reading and reflecting the emotions around them. She contrasts postconquest thought, divorced from the body, with preconquest thought, congruent with the body. Horses respond to lack of congruence as a threat, thus giving feedback to help people reconnect with their body and emotions.

One case study highlighted how we tend to respond to agitation by mirroring it. Instead, we can consciously calm ourselves, inviting the other person (or horse) to become calm as well. I’ll keep that technique in mind.

Before reading this book, I had heard of equine facilitated therapy without much interest. As I was reading it, I wished Kohanov’s ranch were closer than Arizona so I could go try it out. Her combination of sensitivity and groundedness sounds similar to the healing work I do.

Available at bookshop.org.

“Bird by Bird” by Anne Lamott

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Subtitle: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

Anne Lamott’s writing process seems reassuringly similar to my own, and seems to include just as much struggle. She advises us to write everything that comes to mind, and then later refine it into clarity and grace. A lot of the book is devoted to all the ways we get in our own way, and how sorry she is that there isn’t a more direct route.

“Writing a first draft is very much like watching a Polaroid develop. You can’t – and in fact you’re not supposed to – know exactly what the picture is going to look like until it has finished developing.” Oh good. Maybe I’m doing it right after all.

She emphasizes both looking inside for our own truths, and observing the world around us to flesh out those truths. She reminds to do both with as much detached compassion as we can scrape together.

On character creation: “My friend Carpenter talks about the unconscious as the cellar where the little boy sits who creates the characters, and he hands them up to you through the cellar door. He might as well be cutting out paper dolls. He’s peaceful; he’s just playing.” … “You may want to come up with an image or a metaphor for this other part of you that is separate from your rational, conscious mind, this other person with whom you can collaborate. This may help you feel less alone.” I’ll have to try this – I’d love to feel less alone with my book-writing project!

She keeps a 1 inch square picture frame by her desk to remind her to focus in on one viewpoint and one scene at a time. A whole book is made up of paragraphs. Write the paragraphs, the sentences, the words.

Since I’m struggling with organizing my own book, I noticed that her chapter headings are laconic and her transitions brief. Each chapter meanders among writing class anecdotes, writing advice, snippets of poetry, and life anecdotes. I’m sure she spent many hours crafting each chapter to flow so casually and conversationally. At the same time, it’s good to notice that it reads just fine as it meanders, and my book might be allowed to meander too.

Somehow, at the end of reading this book, I feel less stuck around organizing my own, and more like I’m moving slowly. And that moving slowly is okay, fortunately, since that’s the way it is right now.

Available at bookshop.org.

“Explain Pain” by David Butler and Lorimer Moseley

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Recommended to me by: Kim Hillis, PT

If this book didn’t cost $70, I would be telling every client and practitioner to buy one right now. Both scientific and playful, it offers the latest research about understanding and healing chronic pain.

The sensation of pain is the brain’s response to perceived threat. Until it is interpreted by the brain, pain is (just) an electrical and chemical signal.

Pain is initially associated with tissue damage and inflammation (acute pain). Sometimes the pain response continues after the tissue has gone through the healing process (chronic pain).

Pain does not always correlate with tissue damage, especially with chronic pain. As pain continues, the nervous system adapts by making the pain signal easier to trigger. Emotional stress and beliefs about pain can contribute to triggering pain in a frustrating negative cycle.

The body’s representation in the brain (the homonculus) becomes “smudged” in areas of chronic pain. This can be corrected with gentle movement, retraining the brain to represent the body more accurately.

“Hurt does not always equal harm.” A sensitized nervous system can be retrained and calmed through gradual increases in activity. Having fun and varying the context of a painful movement can help retrain the nervous system.

Explain Pain blog: explainpain.blogspot.com

Available from NOIGroup in Australia or OPTP in the US

“Women Food and God” by Geneen Roth

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Recommended to me by: a client.

The opening scene drew me in immediately. Geneen Roth shows eighty women furious at her because she is not yet letting them eat their tomato soup at a retreat about food and mindfulness. A few women bravely share their process of connecting to old pain and realizing that their adult selves can tolerate the pain without numbing themselves with excessive food.

Roth’s core message is transformative: how we relate to food is how we relate to our image of God. Until we bring conscious awareness to our process, how we relate to food and God is likely to be modeled on how our earliest caretakers related to us, and to themselves.

When we realize that we don’t need fixing, that our core self is already radiantly sacred, our obsessions and addictions fall away.

In my twenties, I hated my body, dieted regularly, and obsessed about food. In my thirties, I declared a moratorium on diets. I make my choices about food and exercise, and my body weighs whatever it’s going to weigh. It did that anyway, even when I counted calories.

Sometime after that, I declared that I don’t need fixing. I had hit bottom with allowing others to tell me what might be wrong with me. The message is spreading through me over time. Some parts of me continue to believe that it’s helpful to criticize or shame myself.

I wonder if Geneen Roth is experiencing something similar. Her overt message is about self-acceptance and compassion. At the same time, the book is sprinkled with half-joking self-denigrating comments.

There is a subtle negativity about being fat as well. One example: In the prologue where eighty women are waiting to eat their soup, one woman’s “tiny body” is described as “delicate, perfectly erect.” No one else’s body is described at all.

I hear the message as, “When you are self-accepting and self-aware, your healthy food and exercise choices will cause you to arrive at your natural weight, which will not be fat.” It is hard to be self-accepting as a fat person, while also believing that healthy, “natural weight” people are not fat.

I love Geneen Roth’s message that our adult selves can handle pain that was overwhelming in childhood. We’re not broken after all. I hope her next book will include more self-acceptance and compassion for compulsive eating and all our other “negative” avoidance behaviors.

I recommend Kate Harding’s blog Shapely Prose for more about fat acceptance. Two relevant articles are But Don’t You Realize Fat is Unhealthy and Why I Still Use the Term Fat Acceptance.

Previously reviewed: “When Food is Love” by Geneen Roth.

Available at bookshop.org.