Curious, Healing

Books about healing, business, and fun

“The Family of Man” by Edward Steichen

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Recommended to me by: Asakiyume

A photo book from an exhibition in 1955 showing 503 photographs of people from around the world living their lives.

The use of “Man” for people bothered me at the outset, and I grumpily examined the book through the lens of inclusion and exclusion. There are women and people of color pictured, and the women get to be strong and active too. The places where men predominate, in suits in a courtroom for example, they predominated in 1955. There were many photos from the USA, where the exhibit was originally held.

This is a great book for children, to show them that people are essentially the same everywhere, and also that people and cultures have infinite variation. Also a great book to find prompts for stories. I wanted to know more about the people in each photo, to get to know a few of them in depth rather than move through the teeming crowd of them.

Asakiyume’s post has a great sampling of photos.

Available at bookshop.org.

“mindful eating” by Jan Chozen Bays, MD

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Subtitle: A Guide to Rediscovering a Healthy and Joyful Relationship with Food

Recommended to me by: a client

Unlike the deep compassion and acceptance for how things are right now that I found in Cheri Huber’s books, this book is judgmental, directive, and critical. It recommends mindfulness as a method to restrict food and lose weight, even though it has been repeatedly scientifically shown that 95% of people regain weight lost through dieting no matter what the dieting method.

At the same time, mindfulness about eating is useful, as long as it is done with kindness. Eating is central to our existence, nourishing body and soul.

Jan Chozen Bays is both a Western medical doctor and a Zen teacher. She identifies 7 kinds of hunger: eye hunger, nose hunger, mouth hunger, stomach hunger, cell hunger, and heart hunger. We can check in with ourselves about what level of hunger we are experiencing in each channel, and what would nourish us via that channel.

We can pause before, during, and after meals to invite awareness of our physical sensations in the mouth and belly. We can experiment with chewing a bite thoroughly. We can pay attention to the first three bites. We can try stopping eating when we are no longer hungry, rather than full. We can bring awareness to emptiness.

We can do body scans and send kindness and gratitude to all our parts. Hakuin Zenji’s soft butter meditation: Imagine a lump of soft butter the size and shape of a duck egg on the crown of your head. As it melts and trickles down inside and outside you, it permeates you with warmth and good feelings. Feel it trickle through you all the way to your feet.

We can give ourselves boundless permission to eat exactly the way we eat right now.

This book is not recommended for anyone who is prone to self-judgment about weight and eating habits.

Available at bookshop.org.

“Active Hope” by Joanna Macy & Chris Johnstone

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Subtitle: How to Face the Mess We’re in without Going Crazy

This book, published in 2012, is a practical manual on how to live in challenging times. It has only become more necessary since it first came out.

It starts with three stories of our times, Business As Usual, the Great Unraveling, and the Great Turning. The book is written to those with enough privilege to choose Business As Usual, with encouragement to avoid the despair of staying in the Great Unraveling of runaway climate change, and choose the Great Turning toward sustainable lifestyles instead. Oddly, the book does not address privilege directly at all. It does look like they’re moving toward more awareness of oppression.

Joanna Macy leads workshops in the Work That Reconnects, a four step process. It is rooted in gratitude, grows into honoring our pain, blooms into seeing with new eyes, and creates seeds of going forth, taking action. These steps can happen in the span of a lifetime, and in the span of a few minutes. We go around the steps repeatedly, in a spiral. More about the spiral, with a great image.

Gratitude reconnects us with the web of life that supports us, and reminds us that we do not live in isolation. We are part of that interconnected web, part of the living Earth.

Honoring our pain and the pain of the earth allows that energy to move through us, and to move us toward action. It also gives permission to those around us to acknowledge their own pain, and connects us with each other in witnessing and giving/receiving support.

When we shift into gratitude and acknowledge our pain, we can shift to a larger perspective and connect both with our inner witness self, and with the voice of our community and the earth. We can start to see our power-within and power-with, instead of staying in hopelessness or power-over.

The seeds of action come from that wider perspective, and from opening to visions of how we want to live and how we can get there. We ask what wants to move through us. We move in the direction of our strengths, and treat our enthusiasm as a renewable resource that needs maintenance. We reach out for support.

We live with uncertainty. We don’t know whether things will turn toward being better or worse, so we lean our small weight in the direction of better. We gradually (or suddenly) move toward living more sustainably and happily.

Recommended for finding a way forward in these difficult times. This book is based in environmental activism, but is more generally applicable. It does point out that anyone living in the story of the Great Turning is an activist, whether we go to protests or not. No matter what the ultimate outcome is, I’d rather live day to day incrementally supporting the world I want to see, rather than contributing to the disaster by ignoring it or despairing.

Available at bookshop.org.

“This Is How It Always Is” by Laurie Frankel

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Subtitle: A Novel

Recommended to me by: a friend

A wonderful multi-layered novel about a doctor, her poet-husband, and their five kids, the youngest of whom insists on wearing dresses. The family brims with love and wackiness as they struggle with the many dilemmas of being themselves. They shelter their youngest member as best they can from society’s dysfunctional responses to someone who does not slot neatly into the gender binary.

Highly recommended.

Available at bookshop.org.

“All Your Worth” by Elizabeth Warren & Amelia Warren Tyagi

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Subtitle: The Ultimate Lifetime Money Plan

Recommended to me by: Lis

This is a practical, down-to-earth book written in a warm, reassuring style by a mother-daughter team. The authors know that most readers will have a great deal of anxiety about finances, so they try to settle that first thing.

Their plan:
From your total income after taxes
50% Must-Haves
30% Wants
20% Savings

The goal is to get finances running smoothly so that they can be in the background rather than the foreground.

Their plan makes sense to me, which means it’s congruent with the financial advice I absorbed growing up. Minimize debt, even for a mortgage. Reduce recurring expenses as much as possible. Shop carefully for insurance, since it’s essentially betting against yourself. Saving is important. And, as I have learned over time, it’s important to have fun and enjoy life, too.

The plan is based on having a salary, so I’ve been thinking about how to apply it to a sole proprietor business. I think I’ll have to add a second set of categories for the business, and guesstimate the taxes as a straight percentage of income. Still, it seems useful enough to me to be worth going to the trouble of figuring out what my Must-Haves are.

They say Must-Haves are recurring expenses that you can’t put off for six months. Anything else goes into Wants. I think that blurs expenses for maintenance for the house and yard and business. Those can be delayed, but not put off forever. I might add a sub-category for that under Wants and see how much room it takes up. It’s also unclear to me where major expenses like a new roof fall. You save up for them, and they’re optional for a while until something goes wrong and suddenly they’re a Must-Have.

The book was published in 2005, and they have the same cheerfully optimistic advice about the stock market that I received with my first 401k in 1991. After losing my first chunk of retirement savings in the dot-bomb of 2001 and then watching my socially conscious investments stagnate, I no longer think the stock market is a viable savings strategy for socially conscious investors. I haven’t come up with a good alternate strategy, however.

I’ve also seen the rule, 10% of after-tax income for charity and making the world a better place. I was surprised not to see charity brought up anywhere in this book. I suppose that falls under Wants, but to me it seems like an important category. They wanted to keep things very simple.

The last section of the book is about planning for financial emergencies – job loss, serious illness, etc. Plan which Wants to cut first. Plan how to reduce Must-Haves if becomes necessary. It even has a section on how and when to declare bankruptcy.

Recommended for a practical, reassuring way to think about your finances.

Available at bookshop.org.

“My Brother’s Husband” by Gengoroh Tagame

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Translated from the Japanese by Anne Ishii

Recommended to me by: Yatima in the 50 books by POC community

Yatima found this graphic novel via its blurb by Alison Bechdel and recommended it enthusiastically. I loved it too.

Mike Flanagan, Canadian white guy, visits his dead husband’s brother and niece in Japan. They are both traditionally Japanese. Yaichi the brother has a lot of unexamined homophobia and buried emotions, but invites Mike to stay with them anyway. Kana the niece didn’t know that men could marry each other, but responds to Mike warmly.

The book handles relationships and emotions tenderly. Kana is adorable. This book is about the small things in life, meals and sleeping and showers, and the largest things, death and loss and love and relationships and coming out as gay.

The characters are kind to one another. There is something to be said for polite emotional reserve. Some drawings show what Yaichi is yelling inside his head, and the neutral things he says out loud.

As is traditional for Manga, the book reads right to left. I had to be careful to read the panels in the right order on each page. Apparently there are more volumes to come!

Highly recommended.

Available at bookshop.org.