Curious, Healing
Books about healing, business, and fun
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.
Subtitle: Bringing All Parts of You Into Creative Partnership: Conscious & Subconscious, Head & Heart, Masculine & Feminine, Adult & Child, Waking & Dreaming
Recommended to me by: Jenny Davidow
Jenny Davidow’s clear, practical, non-judgmental book covers a surprising array of techniques to make friends with your subconscious. Learn to decode your dream symbols, negotiate inner alliances, create positive endings, take fantasy vacations, transform outdated beliefs, heal your inner child, dream lucidly, connect with your creativity, and widen your choices in your waking life. Vivid examples and detailed exercises encourage you to make these techniques your own.
As seen in the parallel paired contrasts in the subtitle, the book emphasizes stereotypical, Jungian ideas about masculine and feminine attributes. In addition to being passive and receptive, femininity is paired with childhood and innocence. In several examples, women resolve relationship issues, while men resolve career issues.
Both outer relationships and the “inner marriage” between (stereotypical) masculine and feminine aspects are heterosexual, with no discussion of other possibilities.
This book safely skirts the realm of “you control external reality with your thoughts” while offering practical tools to negotiate improvements in your internal reality. Recommended, with the noted caveats.
Subtitle: A sequel to A Little Princess
Recommended to me by: Badgerbag
My copy of A Little Princess (yes, I still have it) is dated 1982, but I think I read it before then from the library. As a young girl grieving, surviving and in need of rescue, I connected deeply with the story of young Sara Crewe and the maid Becky grieving, surviving and being rescued.
This sequel, written not by Frances Hodgson Burnett but by Hilary McKay 100 years later, follows the secondary characters at Miss Minchins Select Seminary for Girls after Sara’s departure. It is a much lighter wish-fulfillment book, plot driven, with one note characters. We are told about their emotions, but they don’t resonate.
The new maid, Alice, takes no nonsense from her employers and refuses to live in the attic, not-so-subtly implying that Becky just needed to stand up for herself. Of course, Alice is in London to “see the sights” and has a loving family to return to if her employment doesn’t work out, unlike Becky who had nowhere to turn.
A Little Princess was about finding resources within and choosing our behavior in hard times. Wishing for Tomorrow, aptly named, seems to be about marking time until everything works out.
Subtitle: Essays on Characteristics, Performance, and Teaching
I jumped at the chance to learn more about my favorite hobby, and learned more than I bargained for. This book of essays directly addresses the myth that modern Balkan folk dances are innocent indigenous creations, exposing the complex conscious manipulations underlying them.
Communist regimes created folk dance spectacles to convey a sense of unity, prosperity, and celebration. In Yugoslavia, this was particularly elaborate since it wove together several ethnic and religious groups which later fractured back into separate countries. In Bulgaria, much of the beloved “folk” music was composed in the early 20th century for performance.
Minority groups such as Turks in Bulgaria, Muslims in Yugoslavia, and Roma (Gypsies) everywhere were erased or stigmatized in folk dance performances.
The book prompted me to think about what it means for Americans to be studying and performing these dances recreationally. It certainly puts arguments about “tradition” and “authenticity” in perspective when the dance under discussion was initially performed as communist propaganda.
The essays vary from very readable to densely academic. All contain information new to me about a hobby I’ve pursued for years. Well worth investigating if you’re interested in Balkan dancing.