Curious, Healing
Books about healing, business, and fun
Subtitle: The Vibrant Culture and Savory Food of the Republic of Georgia
In Georgian singing classes, we talked about the integral role of singing in Georgian feasts, or supras. However, this book only had a one-sentence aside about singing. The rest is a Georgian travelogue and recipe book. It seems that different travelers focus on different aspects of their experiences.
The book gave me a sense for Georgian geography and culture, and would be useful if I wanted to take up Georgian cooking.
Subtitle: The Practical Application of Body Mapping and the Alexander Technique to Making Music
Recommended to me by: Rosi Goldsmith
This book is filled with detailed illustrations of the body’s structure and how the parts work together, presented in a playful, declarative way. “If you already have a very free neck, Celebrate!”
I was frustrated by admonitions like, “Freeing your neck is the key to freeing the whole of you!” without accompanying instructions on how to accomplish that. I’ve been working on freeing my neck for years.
Then I got to the page that begins, “Imagine your legs feeling as free and mobile as your arms.” In a paragraph about the similarities about arms and legs, I read, “Arms and legs are out at our sides.” Oh! Suddenly I could feel the joint between my femurs and pelvis from the inside. I’ve been looking for it for years, but I didn’t have the right mental image to find it.
That epiphany alone more than repays my investment in the book. I imagine that someday an accumulation of epiphanies will free my neck as well.
Recommended for anyone, musician or not, who wants to learn more about how the human body works and doesn’t mind some whimsy along the way.
Subtitle: A collection of traditional folk, church and urban songs from Georgia
Recommended to me by: Jen Morris
This is primarily a book of sheet music, so I have not read it cover to cover, but it contains a lot of background material on Georgian music, as well as useful nuggets of information with each song and the occasional photograph. I have paged through it looking for songs I recognize, and listened to recordings of included songs to find new ones I like.
Each song is transcribed in 3-part harmony with transliterated Georgian words and English translations.
This is a wonderful source of information for those interested in Georgian singing and Georgian singers. Highly recommended.
The paintings are colorful, vivid, powerful. Each one is accompanied by a paragraph of background or interpretation.
The poems are concrete, metaphorical, full of truth and clarity.
“Life is abundant in the soft places
The broken spaces between hard things.”
Recommended as a window into individual and universal healing.
Subtitle: Remember When It Didn’t Hurt
Recommended to me by: Rosalind Bell
This book is a beautifully photographed and illustrated step-by-step guide to moving well as a human. It is also a carefully crafted sales brochure for the author’s clinic and method, with testimonials sprinkled liberally through the text.
Esther Gokhale (“Go-clay”) grew up in India, studied biochemistry and acupuncture in the US, and, inspired by her own back pain, conducted research on body mechanics in Burkina Faso, India, Portugal, and elsewhere.
She suggests that we integrate stretchsitting, stretchlying, tallstanding, and glidewalking into our lives to regain our birthright of healthy pain-free movement. The foundation of these movements is to allow the pelvis to tip forward so the top is lower in front and the sacrum protrudes slightly in back. The rest of the back remains relatively straight, with the shoulders settled down and back.
In contrast, many of us learned to tuck the pelvis so that if we had a tail, we’d be sitting on it.
The photographs of babies and adults from around the world are gorgeous and convincing. The book is carefully respectful of traditional cultures and full-figured people. I would have liked to see photos of people of color from the USA, and white people from traditional cultures, rather than the strict divide with only white people from the USA and people of color from traditional cultures.
While there is a lot of discussion about cultural influences on posture, there is no reference to the long-term effects of physical and emotional trauma. For some people there is more to healing than learning to move with a stretched back.
I highly recommend this book for the photos, for new ways of observing movement and posture, and for useful exercises to improve the use of your body.
Recommended to me by: A client.
This children’s book was written in 1946 about a bear who emerges from peaceful hibernation to find that a factory has been built around his cave. The factory managers tell him to get to work. When he protests that he is a bear, one manager after another tells him he is a silly man who needs a shave and wears a fur coat. Eventually they wear him down and he comes to believe them.
This is a classic example of gaslighting – making someone doubt their own reality.
The book is beautifully illustrated with Tashlin’s line drawings. The only downside to the book is blatant sexism in the illustrations. For example, each (male) factory manager has a series of shapely female secretaries. Aside from that, I wholeheartedly recommend the book, which supports the idea of listening to your own truth and not letting yourself be outvoted by other people’s opinions.