a few books and why

Transformation through suffering can only happen when in some way or another the pain is unavoidable, and a deeper purpose is found to experience pain with dignity. This life purpose allows for the emergence of self-humour and an ability to lightly observe all the ways we dance around our own fulfillment.

Seeing the absurdities with radical empathy and acceptance can release even highly persistent and forceful anxiety and panic.

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Just before reading this book I began to expand the space between my reactions and my actions, so it came at the perfect time to make sense of the growing pains.

This book has a fierce but magical way of examining the paradoxes of being human. It offers concrete guidance to creatively and flexibly look at the internal fragmentation, self-alienation, and dissociation we can experience as a response to cumulative trauma and stress. 

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I had to read this one page per sitting on some days, as it made me simultaneously so sad, scared, hopeful and relieved. It certainly broke my wall of judgment into a big pile of rubble. 

Pain is unavoidable, but we can make good use of it to grow our light, love and happiness.

However, I read this in a phase where I could not see the nutritional value of my agony. Still this book helped me connect to a body sensation of being cloaked in a kind of mud bath of discomfort.

It became a kind of "oh I'm in the mud bath again" experience instead of feeling overwhelmed by the content of my pain I could focus better on the spreading of the experience to all corners of my being, enveloped in the demise, awaiting the rebirth, that in-between spot where peace is perhaps even strongest. 

The clear insight into how regulating the nervous system is a gateway to recovery, to resilient relationships, healing and rewriting our stories by living into a future we wish for rather than digging through the past from a place of distress.

Plot twist. Our inner critics are on our side! This book has some useful perspectives into the various ways we speak to ourselves and why this is natural development given our life experiences. 

Interestingly I read this when I was around 16 and felt so drawn to it for years, I would fantasize that life would give me some kind of grand obstacle that would require me to break all my existing self and become something else. Though life did deliver, all my preparation was rather in vein as it came nothing like I had envisioned and my tools were like plastic toys trying to build a giant ship.

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This discrepancy taught me to stop imagining my life and all the possible scenarios and to believe that what is there is already the life that I am to live - it is not hidden away somewhere for me to find, I am in the midst of it. 

A sigh, a pause from the day, a glimmer of joy - that is what this book brought to me when I first found it, and continues to do so when I occasionally open it at a random page.

This book changed my perspective of what it is to make art and to publish a book. It made me feel like breaking out of my pattern of grandiose thinking and go for authentic expression of where I am at in life and in my art journey. 

The ebb and flow of life, freedom and trust are wonderfully explored in this moving book, like a recipe book, inspiring to try baking and finding own secret laws spoken softly through the little things in life. This read gave me hope when I had little.  

Forward facing beings with spines that can rotate in a myriad of directions, we eat our way through the world and though culture would like to tame us into dying before we die, there is incredible resilience and capacity to undo the traumatic experiences we live through, physical and otherwise. 

Realising how little the behaviour of other people had to do with me was so crushing but so relieving all at once. Realising how much rubbish I spoke everyday that betrayed what I meant, what I wanted, what I really believe in, just as tools to manage other people felt devastating, but relieving all at once. That means all I had to do was sit and wait what happens when I am true to me, when I say what I need, and not take personal when others do not meet those needs. This book is dangerous though, because it can be yet another "ought to" if not seen as simple tools to challenge the mind but as some kind of ultimate truth. 

I read this when I was 18 or so, and felt glued to the possibilities hidden in each individual, it made me second guess my judgements and soften my perspective on what it means to hide in a world where one is misunderstood. This book gave me tools to empathize with my exiled inner selves without knowing of them, I was more patient with myself, though this was unconscious, the benefit was there all the same.