Curious, Healing

Books about healing, business, and fun

psychology

“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.

“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.

“A Master Class in Gremlin-Taming” by Rick Carson

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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 expectations 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 bookshop.org.

“Finding Life Beyond Trauma” by Victoria Follette, Ph.D. and Jacqueline Pistorello, Ph.D.

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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 bookshop.org.

“Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?” by Seth Godin

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Recommended to me 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 bookshop.org.

“How to Get From Where You Are to Where You Want To Be” by Cheri Huber

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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:

  1. Choose an issue you want to work with.
  2. Sit down, stay still, and be aware of all that goes on.
  3. Notice what belief systems are held in place with this issue.
  4. Notice which subpersonalities [and/or defense mechanisms] are involved.
  5. Listen to what the [internal judging] voices have to say about the issue about who you are for having it.
  6. Become aware of the projections made onto yourself and others because of this issue.
  7. Explore the emotions that keep this issue real.
  8. Find out where the issue is held in your body – where is the epicenter?
  9. Practice disidentifying by moving your focus of attention away from the issue and returning it to the breath.
  10. 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 bookshop.org.