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: A woman explores the transforming – and, paradoxically, healing – experience of being ill
Recommended to me by: a client
Alchemists strive to turn lead into gold by heating it alone in a sealed container, a crucible. In the crucible of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Kat Duff turned inward and found healing in the stillness and isolation forced by her illness.
Weaving together symptoms, dreams, mythology, Jungian psychology, and alchemy along with anthropological research into illness and healing, Duff reveals new perspectives on illness. Instead of being an assault or a punishment, illness can be a natural consequence of our history as individuals and communities. She sees her illness as an agent of healing both for sexual abuse she suffered as an infant, and for the land theft her forebears committed against the Sioux tribe in Minnesota.
Duff is careful to avoid the painful idea that “sick people are personally responsible for creating their illnesses through some kind of wrong-thinking or wrong-doing.” Sickness isn’t bad. It just is.
She relates a story about Nan Shin, a Zen nun diagnosed with cancer and struggling with guilt and remorse.
Then an old friend, who was also a Zen student, visited. He threw his arm around her shoulders and wisecracked, “Good Karma, huh? Brings you close to the Way.” Shin wrote later, “The jolt I felt then showed me very clearly that I had been thinking, Bad Karma. Within a fraction of a second the molecules turned themselves round and reorganized. I am flatly grateful to him forever.”
Unfortunately, Duff conflates illness with disability, and occasionally uses phrases like “confined to a wheelchair.” People are not confined by wheelchairs any more than people are confined by bicycles, cars, or any other device that assists mobility.
I recommend this book for its kaleidoscope of new perspectives about illness.
Subtitle: Chronicles of the Worst Buddhist in the World
Recommended to me by: Bay Area Spirituality Bookgroup
Mary Pipher didn’t expect to become famous for writing “Reviving Ophelia” and she fell into despair after years of touring and speaking engagements. The book covers her despair, her parents, her childhood, and then her healing. She says she is the worst Buddhist in the world because she has trouble sitting still and paying attention.
In the introduction she apologizes at length for having a crisis as a happily married and successful career woman when other people have real problems and real traumas. Then she describes her childhood family’s real problems and real traumas. She did have a fairly ordinary college career and young adulthood, at which point I put the book aside in frustration at its circular approach to the initially-described crisis.
I did pick it up again and read quickly through her healing approach, which included slowing way down, spending a lot of time in nature, trying yoga and massage for the first time, and meditating. She notices her vicious self-critic who cares about whether she is helping others but not about whether she is happy. With time and attention the critic mellows and she comes to a place of more acceptance for herself as she is.
I wish she had noted in her introduction that comparing our crises and traumas to other people’s is a tool of self-criticism rather than compassion. Swallowing our pain because someone else has been hurt more helps no one.
Subtitle: becoming unwounded, a memoir of transformation
Recommended to me by: Keelin Anderson
To tell her story of healing from incest and emotional abuse, Keelin Anderson weaves together daily narrative, fiction, quotes, tarot readings, and dreams, all in present tense.
As I read, I saw places where our paths have overlapped, and places where they have diverged. We have both struggled with finding respectful healers to help us, and have vowed to be respectful of our own clients and their individual processes.
She consciously decides to invite spirit guides into her process. I did that for a while, but found that not all spirit guides are trustworthy, and I was better off looking within for guidance. I think there are many ways of contacting Spirit and healing.
Subtitle: How I Lost the Mormons and Found My Faith
Recommended to me by: Reading Martha Beck’s older books
I first read this years ago and loved it. I came back to it while writing a (forthcoming) article about spiritual abuse and faith. Since I last read it, I read her newer book “Steering by Starlight” and saw that her latest book is about weight-loss, so I started re-reading with trepidation. I still like this one, though!
This book is honest about extreme sexual and spiritual abuse and its effects, side by side with humorous details about daily life. She talks about forgiveness without preaching (much). She talks about how crazymaking it is to have someone casually deny reality. She talks about how wrenching it is to lose family connections because she tells the truth.
She also talks about her personal search for faith, first as the seeking camel, then as the discerning lion, then as the innocent, playful child.
In her last act as a practicing Mormon, she spoke to a huge crowd about domestic violence. “If something I said feels right to you, believe it. If it feels wrong, disbelieve it. The choice to believe or disbelieve, that’s what makes you free.”
Subtitle: Some thoughts on faith
I stumbled across this book while looking for a quote about forgiveness. I usually find Anne Lamott’s books laugh-out-loud funny, reassuringly insightful, or disturbingly insightful. This book, a series of autobiographical essays about faith and religion, left me cold.
Maybe it was the large daily consumption of alcohol and other drugs she reports before she got sober. I can’t tell if she’s exaggerating or not!
Maybe it was the pretend conversion to Judaism in college, where one of the questions was “Do Jews camp?” The response was, “No, we should be at home where it’s comfortable.” She has to memorize a recipe for “Candle Salad” which includes an upright banana with a maraschino cherry on top. The vignette screeches right past funny into ugly stereotypes and cultural appropriation.
Maybe it was the later conversion to Christianity, where she describes Jesus following her everywhere like “a little cat running along at my heels.” I’m glad she found a spiritual home at St. Andrew Presbyterian Church, and at the same time the description sounds a little too much like spiritual stalking to me.
Reading this book felt like having tea with a distraught, judgmental friend who is telling me every little detail of her troubles, including mean physical descriptions of the people involved, without pausing to ask how I’m doing.