Reading for me, is spending time with a friend.
- Gary Paulsen
A frequent question I get from friends and former clients who aspire to learn and unlearn is, “What are you reading?”
Below is the list of 5 books in progress or sitting on my bookshelves waiting to be read.
1) A Course in Miracles
This year I have been attempting again to read through A Course in Miracles - a self-study guide for inner peace.
I am among the countless who has experienced confusion and resistance in my former attempts to study it. There are daily lessons to review and required practices that I have had more difficulty incorporating into my day as of late.
I am struggling to wrap my head around the teachings that:
all illness is mental illness,
all healing involves love, the forgiveness of even the most offensive behaviours, and psychotherapy
and the route to salvation is through relationships that challenge us to become better versions of ourselves.
This is not a walk in the park, but I persevere.
2) It’s never too late to be healthy - Reaching peak health in middle age
A former client and fellow health advocate, Kevin Brady, sent me his newly published book. Apparently, it’s flying off the shelves. I'm not surprised.
Having watched Kevin embrace a holistic approach to self-healing and launch a business that encourages investment in the health and well-being of employees, I applaud his effort to efficiently and effectively share widely what he has had the privilege to learn.
3) This is your mind on plants
Any book Michael Pollan writes, I read. He is a visionary leader, influencer and activist, who has written extensively about the healing power of plants. More recently, he has focused on researching and writing about using plants to change minds and alter states of consciousness.
Nature provides all the remedies we require. More incentive is needed to study non-patentable medicinal qualities of natural things and teach about them in medical schools.
If Michael Pollan is writing about something, I pay attention, as do policymakers. In This is your mind on plants, he writes about opium, caffeine and mescaline.
Given lab-made, patentable drugs for mental health have been an epic fail, the content of this book is timely. I can hardly wait to learn and share.
4) Value(s) - Building a better world for all
Having heard Mark Carney interviewed on CBC earlier this year, I immediately added his recent book, Value(s), to my list of must-reads.
While Canadians assign great value to front line nurses, the natural environment, well-nourished and educated children, economic markets do not reflect their importance.
At 600 pages, the task of reading this book seems daunting. But, from Mark's well-informed perspective and wisdom, we can learn how to help create a more sustainable and equitable future for generations to come.
Of course anyone who truly loves books buys more of them than he or she can hope to read in one fleeting lifetime. A good book, resting unopened in its slot on a shelf, full of majestic potentiality, is the most comforting sort of intellectual wallpaper.
~ David Quammen
5) What Happened to You? Conversations on trauma, resilience and healing
Your biography becomes your biology.
~ Caroline Myss
Right now, I am reading Dr Bruce Perry MD PhD and Oprah Winfrey’s new book, What Happened to You?
As of late, I have been doing the best I can to be present, attempting to abstain from rehashing the past or obsessing about the future.
However, in the recent past, I have had the opportunity to reflect extensively on my biography. Reading this book re-emphasized how our history shapes who we are and what we experience.
Awareness is the first step in the quest to create change.
To address the underlying cause of any health affliction, rather than asking what is wrong with you, Dr Perry and Oprah share stories that make a compelling case for asking what happened to you? Adverse childhood events (ACE’s), and traumatic experiences, are associated with increased risk for health problems as we age.
A story about trauma and diabetes struck a chord. Tyra, a 16-year-old girl, was admitted to the hospital in a diabetic coma; her blood sugar had risen so high that she was unconscious. Her medical team helped her regain consciousness, but Tyra's blood sugar levels became so erratic that the health care practitioners suspected self-sabotaging behaviour. They thought she might be manipulating the insulin dose or secretly eating sweets. They asked Dr Perry to do a psychiatric assessment.
Tyra had been managing her blood sugar levels effectively for years. She seemed pleasant and cooperative until a siren from an ambulance arriving at the hospital’s emergency room changed her disposition. She stopped talking and became visibly tense. Dr Perry took her heart rate. Her pulse was 128 beats per minute - far too high for a teen at rest. He asked why the siren upset her? She was wondering if someone might be hurt?
Two weeks prior, Tyra had been sitting at a picnic table with her friends. It was the middle of the day. Beside her was Nina, who suddenly looked at her horrified, made a little squeak and fell over. Tyra had not even heard the gunshot, but there was blood all over Nina's back. An ambulance took forever to arrive. Just telling the story elevated Tyra’s pulse rate to 160 beats per minute. Her doctors had no clue this had happened.
Every time Tyra heard the ambulance siren approaching the emergency room, adrenaline flooded her body, dumping sugar into her bloodstream to prepare her to fight or flee. The doctors speculated self-destructive behaviour, but it was past trauma triggering her physical overreaction. The power of thought!
The reason this story struck a chord had to do with the fact that when occasionally my late father ended up in the hospital, a place that caused him to fear for his life, his pulse rate, blood pressure and blood sugar levels would end up sky high. It took insulin, a couple of blood sugar lowering drugs and several blood pressure-lowering medications to stabilize him. He would be sent home with drug prescriptions he did not need when he was not stressed. I saw the same pattern repeat itself with several others.
Dr Perry wisely observes that:
Even in the absence of major traumatic events, unpredictable stress and the lack of control that goes with it are enough to make our stress-response systems sensitized - overactive and overly reactive- creating the internal storm.
At one point, given the stress associated with helping to manage the care of a family member, I decided to test my blood sugar levels for a week, and oh my gosh, one would have concluded I was diabetic. Food choices and timing had no impact. Just thoughts. Yet, as with my father, looking at my HBA1C lab results, an assessment of blood sugar metabolism over three months, all was well. What a perfect example of how stress can affect our biology! And how and why people may end up over-medicated long term, for short term afflictions.
I think books are like people, in the sense that they’ll turn up in your life when you most need them.
~ Emma Thompson
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