David J. Bookbinder's Blog, page 9
March 23, 2017
“Crazy” Amazon book sale
Setting up Transformations Press as an Amazon seller seems to have triggered a little price war on Amazon:
Amazon.com itself is now selling the print version of Paths to Wholeness for $25.34 and it’s eligible for Amazon Prime free shipping! Normally, Amazon sells it for $40.
I don’t know how long they will keep it at that price, but if you have been holding off buying the book because of the cost and would like a copy, this is probably as low as it will go.
Here’s the link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0984699406
Thanks!
David
March 22, 2017
Balance: Hanging in the Balance
NOTE: This is a first draft of what will eventually be a chapter in a book. Responses, corrections, and any other observations are welcome, either via email or, preferably, as comments on this post.
Hanging in the Balance
There once was a Zen monk who, while walking across a field, encountered a ferocious tiger. The tiger chased the monk across the field until he reached the edge of a high cliff. The monk’s only chance was to grab a vine that grew at the cliff’s edge and lower himself out of the tiger’s reach. As the monk hung from the vine, he saw that below him, another tiger was waiting. He also noticed two mice starting to gnaw on the vine.
What could the monk do now?
Although few of us are literally pursued by tigers above and tigers below, most of us have to deal with one of UnBalancer’s chief confederates, Uncertainty. And if we haven’t yet, we will soon enough.
NOTE: “Confederate” is the term I’m using for the accomplices of UnBalancer. Besides Uncertainty, these include unbalancers such as Entropy, Chance, Illness, Accident, Loss, Misfortune, Obliviousness, Fear, Greed, Distrust, Anger, Hatred, Doubt, Jealousy, or any of the myriad external and internal forces that can knock us out of alignment.
We’re uncertain about what will happen in our relationships, the economy, the climate; how people see us; how an undertaking will go; how our children will do in school, and in life; what will become of us as we age. And no matter who we are and what we have accomplished, we are uncertain about our own end – when it will occur, what will cause it, whether we will suffer, how we will be remembered, what will happen afterward. The only thing we can really be certain of is Uncertainty.
For many of us, Uncertainty is the biggest threat to Balance of all UnBalancer’s confederates. Unlike the more acute unbalancers, Uncertainty isn’t a sudden blow to our internal gyroscopes that makes us tilt, after which we go through a recovery process and move on. Instead, it can feel like a constant pressure, pushing us steadily down; one that, if it goes on long enough, with enough force, grinds our bearings into grit.
Some years ago, I moved a several hundred books and vinyl records from Buffalo to Boston, filling not only the trunk but also the front and back seats of my car with heavy boxes. By the time I got close to home, I could hear a low whine from the left rear of my car, near where the heaviest box, my record collection, sat. Within days, the car began to rumble. Then it screamed. The constant weight had worn out that wheel bearing. Uncertainty can be like that.
Many of us try to combat Uncertainty by creating an illusion of certainty. We anticipate a worst-case or best-case scenario and pretend it’s real, though it’s only a shadow on a wall. When we cling to the best case, we may fail to strive for the best outcome. When we dread the worst case, we become hypervigilant, seeing only signs of catastrophe. Our projections enable us to sidestep Uncertainty, but at a sometimes terrible cost in ignorance and anxiety.
Others follow the adage, “Hope for the best but expect the worst.” We keep up a positive attitude, but we also steel ourselves for disaster. We keep our spare tires inflated, save for a rainy day, buy bread and bottled water when the forecast calls for snow, back up our computers, purchase long-term care insurance, and in this way hope to keep Uncertainty at bay.
Some of us go one better and create multiple backup plans. Like good Boy Scouts, our motto is “Be prepared.” My father, a Boy Scout leader for many years, lived by this credo. He had duplicates, and in some cases triplicates, of all the vital parts of the devices in our house … just in case. Stacked beside his workbench were two or three replacement motors for the washing machine and the dryer. Shelves in a nearby closet overflowed with duplicate faucets, belts, hoses, clamps, fasteners, and other spare parts. We could have stocked a small hardware store with all that stuff. Yet none of these backups were a bulwark against his failing heart.
These typical Balancer strategies for getting us through the anxiety of Uncertainty are sometimes effective. But often, optimism, hypervigilance, platitudes, and even backup plans aren’t enough.
That’s when the gleam appears in UnBalancer’s eyes.
Fortunately, we have more than Balancer’s standard operating procedures to help us handle Uncertainty. Just as UnBalancer has its Confederates, so Balancer has its Allies.
I introduced ReBalancer in a previous post. When Balancer starts to tilt, its first line of defense is ReBalancer, its Chief of Staff. Sometimes ReBalancer, drawing on its storehouse of tools, techniques, and strategies, is equal to the task. But in the face of a powerful combatant like Uncertainty, it may also need to call in other members of Balancer’s cadre.
Balancer’s Allies include Acceptance, Logic, Intuition, Common Sense, Gratitude, Moderation, Patience, Perseverance, Support, and the many other internal and external resources that can help restore equilibrium.
I’ve written elsewhere about using Acceptance and also about what the Romantic poet John Keats called Negative Capability. These are among Balancer’s more powerful Allies. But when the tigers are above and the tigers are below, and the mice are gnawing on your vine, you need to pull out all the stops and call in UnBalancer’s ultimate Ally.
That Ally is Presence.
Let’s return to the monk hanging from his cliff:
As the vine began to give way, with death imminent, the monk also saw a ripe wild strawberry growing on the cliff wall. Clutching the vine with one hand, he plucked the strawberry with the other. He put it in his mouth. “This lovely strawberry,” he thought. “How sweet it tastes.”
In my own life, I’ve faced uncertainties small and large, and so have my friends, family members, and therapy clients. Those who deal most effectively with potentially paralyzing Uncertainty respond very differently than those who succumb. Instead of catastrophizing, exhausting their energy on worry and backup plans, or escaping from their fears with alcohol, drugs, or distraction, they turn their focus to the present. They remain alert to whatever they must do to try to ensure a desired outcome, but they are also fully engaged in everything else in their lives.
Rather than putting their lives on hold when faced with uncertain health, an uncertain relationship, or an uncertain political or economic time, those who vanquish Uncertainty savor the life they have, in each moment. They know that whatever they are uncertain of will, in time, become a certainty, but they are in no hurry to get there. They eat the wild strawberry growing on the cliff wall. They are fully present, and Uncertainty has no power over Presence.
There are everyday examples of this practice, and there are dramatic ones. One particularly striking example comes to mind: the case of Jean-Dominique Bauby.
Bauby, a Parisian journalist and magazine editor, was stricken, at age 43, with a massive stroke that put him into a coma for 20 days. When he awoke, he was completely aware and alert but also nearly paralyzed, able only to swivel his head slightly and to blink his left eye. He was locked in a body with almost no way to communicate his thoughts, feelings, and needs to the outside world. Miraculously, we know what happened to him because he wrote a book about his experiences, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly: A Memoir of Life in Death, from inside this locked-in state.
He wrote his book literally one letter at a time, blinking his left eye while a transcriber recited the French alphabet in order of letter frequency, recording a character when Bauby blinked to indicate his choice. Each word took about two minutes to write and the entire book took 200,000 blinks.
It’s been almost 20 years since I read Bauby’s book, but the contrast between his external and inner worlds is still vivid. I remember, for example, his experience of food. Bauby had been something of a connoisseur and he’d enjoyed many fine meals. After his stroke, he was fed through tubes, perhaps never to eat again. The tiger above and the tiger below. So instead, he “ate” like a king by recalling past meals and rearranging them in his mind.
Although Bauby remained completely aware of his surroundings, he lived mainly in his imagination. He found ways to have a full and meaningful life in what most of us would consider unendurable conditions. “My diving bell becomes less oppressive,” he wrote, “and my mind takes flight like a butterfly. There is so much to do. You can wander off in space or in time, set out for Tierra del Fuego or for King Midas’s court. You can visit the woman you love, slide down beside her and stroke her still-sleeping face. You can build castles in Spain, steal the Golden Fleece, discover Atlantis, realize your childhood dreams and adult ambitions.” Like the Zen monk in our story, he found the strawberry and savored it, dealing with the terror and Uncertainty of his fate by seizing each moment.
Bauby died from pneumonia two days after his book was published. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly sold 25,000 copies on the first day, became the number one bestseller in Europe, and was later made into a well-received film.
Often, we think we are on one path only to find, somewhere down the line, that we have actually been on another without knowing it. We are rattled, and until we become present to the life we are now in, we can dwell in a branch of purgatory managed by Uncertainty. But once we see that this path is, simply, another path, we are free to take in everything that we find along its way. We hold onto the vine and reach for the strawberry and see how sweet it tastes.
More anon,
David
David J. Bookbinder
P.S. I’m experimenting with ways to lower the price of the print version of my book Paths to Wholeness: Fifty-Two Flower Mandalas. Third-party sellers on Amazon seem to be engaged in an automated price war, gradually driving the cost down one penny at a time, so I have become a kind of third-party seller myself, as Transformations Press. I can’t match the discount available to these large third-party sellers, but I have dropped the price from $40 to $28.50 plus shipping. To get that price, click the “New from” link under the main “Paperback $40” price and select the first Transformations Press entry. Order the book from there and I’ll send it to you at the discounted price.
Related Posts:
The Under Toad and the UnBalancer
The Balancer/ReBalancer Tag Team
A Mini-Lesson on Mini Self-Care
Gyroscopes and Personal Flywheels
Hanging in the Balance
Balancing the Books
Books: Paths to Wholeness: Fifty-Two Flower Mandalas
Print: Amazon – BookBaby – B&N – Books-a-Million
eBook: Kindle – Nook – iTunes – Kobo
Also available:
52 (more) Flower Mandalas: An Adult Coloring Book for Inspiration and Stress Relief
52 Flower Mandalas: An Adult Coloring Book for Inspiration and Stress Relief
Paths to Wholeness: Selections (free eBook)
Follow my blog with Bloglovin’
Copyright 2017, David J. Bookbinder
http://www.transformationspress.org
http://www.davidbookbinder.com
http://www.flowermandalas.org
March 14, 2017
Balance: The Balancer/ReBalancer Tag Team
Last week, I wrote about the UnBalancer.
As powerful as UnBalancer is, and as insidious as it can be, each of us has two powerful allies to help us counteract it. One of them is Balancer.
Like UnBalancer, Balancer has been difficult to define. I’m only beginning to understand its totality. It’s not only Awareness, though Awareness is certainly one of its components. It’s not just Mindfulness, either, though Mindfulness can be a powerful aid in maintaining balance. Nor is it fully defined by Logic, Intuition, Common Sense, Moderation, Resilience, or any of the other functions that help us maintain equilibrium most of the time.
Balancer is, I believe, much like the immune system, which automatically monitors our internal and external environments and correctly sorts out, most of the time, what’s us and what’s not, what’s good for us and what isn’t. Or like the pancreas, which in a healthy body automatically regulates, most of the time, the balance of sugar and insulin that is essential for survival.
For many of us, Balancer does a pretty good job handling routine stress levels. It deals with assaults such as minor illnesses, disappointments, bad weather, a too-short night or a too-long day. When these events occur, Balancer automatically compensates, much as a gyroscope can right itself when it’s nudged one way or another.
But if the stress is too much or too long, Balancer can be overpowered, and we start to tilt. That’s when the other ally, Balancer’s more deliberate partner, ReBalancer, fires its retro rockets.
Unlike Balancer, ReBalancer doesn’t automatically engage. It’s a consciously activated composite of the tools, techniques, actions, and supports we’ve acquired so we can restabilize when UnBalancer pushes us too hard, too suddenly, or for too long.
When Balancer fails to maintain equilibrium, ReBalancer can save the day. But ReBalancer can come to the rescue if, and only if, three factors are in place:
1. We let ReBalancer know we need its help
2. ReBalancer is ready to be called into action
3. ReBalancer has the skills needed to handle the situation
The stakes are high for maintaining balance. In my own life, I see numerous examples of UnBalancer getting the better of Balancer. Sometimes ReBalancer came to my aid, but when I was too slow in calling on it, or it wasn’t up to the task, things went south, sometimes permanently.
A couple of examples:
On a physical level, UnBalancer got the upper hand with Type II diabetes. I was diagnosed with the disease ten years ago, but it began as a reversible pre-diabetes a decade earlier, when I started to display the early warning signs: high cholesterol and triglycerides, high blood pressure, episodes of low blood sugar, and a bit of fat around the middle. My body was already out of balance. Calling on ReBalancer would have been a good move, but neither I nor my doctor took my symptoms seriously enough until I was past the point of no return.
Type II diabetes is typical of the Balancer/UnBalancer duel. Because of a combination of genetic and lifestyle factors, the body becomes resistant to the effects of insulin, which normally transports glucose into fat and muscle cells. The pancreas compensates by creating enough insulin to overpower the resistance, but the high insulin levels make the body more insulin-resistant. In a self-destructive cycle that continues for years, the body grows increasingly insulin-resistant and the pancreas pushes itself harder to compensate. By the time pre-diabetes symptoms begin to show, the glucose/insulin metabolism is already close to a tipping point, but nothing clearly screams “Look out! Diabetes on the way!” until it is too late to prevent it. Score one for UnBalancer!
Had I or my doctors been more astute, we would have put ReBalancer into action, creating an exercise and diet program to reverse my symptoms. If I had then incorporated ReBalancer’s program into Balancer’s repertoire, I may have prevented the insulin-producing cells from wearing out.
Another, more recent example is, like diabetes, common in the United States: too much work, not enough downtime, leading to burnout.
As a psychotherapist in private practice, I try to maintain a consistent number of clients. When people leave therapy, I take on new clients until my case load is where I want it. Then I stop until I have more openings. Balancer monitors my schedule and makes sure I don’t see too few clients or add too many.
Sometimes, though, a major world or local event shakes people up and brings many former clients back into therapy. Balancer can usually accommodate a few extra clients, but if I continue to add more, the work/downtime balance tips too far in the work direction. I love my work; it has felt like a calling, and one I gladly answered. But too much of a good thing is still … too much.
The brutal 2014-2015 winter, which broke Boston’s all-time seasonal snowfall record, took its toll not only on the local economy, but also the local psyche. Every week for 14 weeks, former clients, some of whom I hadn’t seen in years, called, emailed, and texted, asking to resume therapy. And because I had a policy of never turning away a former client, I accepted them. All of them.
Balancer’s scheduling arm tried to compensate. It filled gaps in my day normally devoted to paperwork with clients and pushed the paperwork off to the weekend. It added appointment hours first to the end and then to the beginning of one workday, and eventually added extra hours to all five.
While the scheduling arm handled those arrangements, another Balancer arm adjusted the rest of my life. First, it made more efficient use of non-work time. Then, as the clients kept coming, it cut out downtime, eliminating recreational activities, time with friends, and finally basic activities such as meal preparation, house cleaning, car maintenance, and sleep.
You can see where this is going, but I couldn’t. Balancer was too busy balancing, doing its valiant best to let me carry on.
Weeks turned into months, and clients I thought had come for a brief tune-up stayed for a new therapy run, while others continued to arrive. By the time the buds were on the trees I drove past on the way to my office, I was too tired and too wired on caffeine to notice.
UnBalancer was in charge and, to paraphrase William Butler Yeats, things fell apart, the center did not hold.
The slip toward burnout was gradual at first. I’d occasionally forget an appointment, or schedule two people for the same time slot. I procrastinated on billing and missed the payment window for several sessions. I put aside continuing education trainings until the last few months of the year, then had to cram them all in at once, further adding to my stress.
I slept poorly, drinking more coffee to stay alert and needing brief naps between sessions. Though I didn’t know it until my annual physical, my blood pressure had risen to dangerous levels. Only when a capillary in my retina leaked, causing a permanent blind spot, did Balancer pause from its frantic efforts and cry out, “Help!”
ReBalancer tried to come to the rescue, but it was sluggish, out of practice, and short on the skills needed to right the ship again. Over the next few months, I learned to take mini-breaks, add back short-term versions of restorative activities, practice new techniques for overcoming insomnia. I reduced my caffeine intake, shortened sessions, and – hardest of all – learned to say “Sorry, I can’t see you right now” to clients who wanted to return to therapy.
Eventually, clients completed their work and moved on. Slowly, I, too, returned to homeostasis, the skills developed by ReBalancer now incorporated into Balancer’s routines.
In my profession, I typically see people when UnBalancer has had its way for a long time. I’ve built a toolkit for supporting my clients’ ReBalancers and Balancers, equipping them to recover from the subtle mischief UnBalancer carries out.
I’ll cover some of those tools and techniques in future posts.
More anon,
– David
David J. Bookbinder
P.S. This is a first draft of what will eventually be a chapter in a book. Responses, corrections, and any other observations are welcome, either via email or, preferably, as comments on this post.
Books: Paths to Wholeness: Fifty-Two Flower Mandalas
Print: Amazon – BookBaby – B&N – Books-a-Million
eBook: Kindle – Nook – iTunes – Kobo
Also available:
52 (more) Flower Mandalas: An Adult Coloring Book for Inspiration and Stress Relief
52 Flower Mandalas: An Adult Coloring Book for Inspiration and Stress Relief
Paths to Wholeness: Selections (free eBook)
Follow my blog with Bloglovin’
Copyright 2017, David J. Bookbinder
http://www.transformationspress.org
http://www.davidbookbinder.com
http://www.flowermandalas.org
March 8, 2017
Balance: The Under Toad and the UnBalancer
‘The Under Toad,’ Walt said. ‘I’m trying to see it. How big is it?
And Garp and Helen and Duncan held their breath; they realized that all these years Walt had been dreading a giant toad, lurking offshore, waiting to suck him under and drag him out to sea. The terrible Under Toad.
Garp tried to imagine it with him. Would it ever surface? Did it ever float? Or was it always down under, slimy and bloated and ever-watchful for ankles its coated tongue could snare? The vile Under Toad.
In John Irving’s novel The World According to Garp, the Under Toad is a monster created in the mind of young Walt Garp when he misunderstands a warning to beware of the undertow. For Walt’s parents, T. S. and Helen Garp, it becomes a code word for anxiety. “When the traffic was heavy, when the road was icy – when depression had moved in overnight – they said to each other, ‘The Under Toad is strong today.’“
Lately I’ve been contemplating balance and what disrupts it. A cousin of the Under Toad I’m dubbing the UnBalancer comes to mind.
In physical objects, things go out of balance when there’s a design flaw, when something breaks, when unequal forces press on an object. Unbalance typically worsens over time, gradually compromising the whole structure. An unbalanced tire rattles the car. A leak in a roof leads to a ceiling falling in. When winds vibrated the Tacoma Narrows bridge to its resonant frequency in 1940, the whole structure danced briefly and then catastrophically collapsed. When an O-ring failed in the Space Shuttle Challenger, the spacecraft exploded.
The same thing happens to us, individually and collectively, when the myriad forces that throw us out of balance are at play. We begin to wear and to ripple, sometimes to the point of collapse, sometimes to explosion.
These myriad forces have a common source in the UnBalancer. It’s not yet clear to me what the UnBalancer is, but I do know what it is not, or more accurately, not only.
The UnBalancer is not only Chaos, though Chaos can be its ally, nor is it only Entropy, Chance, Accident, Misfortune, Obliviousness, Fear, Greed, Distrust, Anger, Hatred, Passion, Illness, or any of the other internal and external forces that sometimes knock us out of alignment. It’s all of these things, and it’s also more.
The UnBalancer is subtle, a magician that draws our attention to whatever’s in the foreground so it can work its mischief unseen.
When the teeter-totter of work and leisure gets too heavily weighted toward one or the other, things go awry. When our diet gets out of sync with the balance our bodies need to function, the system starts to break down in a multitude of ways. The same goes for waking and sleeping, time to connect and time to be alone, thinking and doing, yin and yang.
The UnBalancer revels in our unawareness, and it loves to spread the joy.
Like the frog (or toad) contentedly sitting in gradually heating water, the path to a multitude of forms of imbalance is almost imperceptible at first. When the books are out of balance, for example, the road to ruin has already been paved but nobody notices. The sh*t hits the fan when there’s nothing left to borrow. Witness the financial collapse of 2008. Or 1929.
The UnBalancer is also patient. On the global scale, the inventions first of agriculture and then of manufacturing have, over thousands of years, unbalanced the Earth itself.
The UnBalancer is strong today. So how do we reckon with it?
That’s the question I’ll be exploring in future installments.
Stay tuned!
More anon,
– David
David J. Bookbinder
P.S. Comments, and observations on your own battles with the UnBalancer, welcome!
Books: Paths to Wholeness: Fifty-Two Flower Mandalas
Print: Amazon – BookBaby – B&N – Books-a-Million
eBook: Kindle – Nook – iTunes – Kobo
Also available:
52 (more) Flower Mandalas: An Adult Coloring Book for Inspiration and Stress Relief
52 Flower Mandalas: An Adult Coloring Book for Inspiration and Stress Relief
Paths to Wholeness: Selections (free eBook)
Follow my blog with Bloglovin’
Copyright 2017, David J. Bookbinder
http://www.transformationspress.org
http://www.davidbookbinder.com
http://www.flowermandalas.org
February 28, 2017
Balance: Gyroscopes and Personal Flywheels
My first counseling psychology supervisor once remarked that every psychologist begins as a child psychologist – as a boy or girl who, to survive childhood, develops the basic skills for psychotherapy.
I’ve been interested in becoming a therapist since my first year in college, but until my 50s, I didn’t know how I could handle the emotions of 20 or 30 people a week. Carrying people’s feelings has always been an issue for me. Only after enduring sufficient difficulties in my own life did I feel that I could handle whatever might show up in my office. Then I returned to school to train as a therapist. Now, years later, achieving balance and centeredness in the midst of what can be the stormy nature of psychotherapy practice is still a work in progress. But I have progressed.
For several years, I tried to use the image of rocks by the seashore as a metaphor for how I wanted to be in therapy sessions – feeling the waves wash over me, yet undisturbed by their ebb and flow. But rocks, as far as we know, are inert, and I didn’t want to be inert. So I looked for a better metaphor.
I wound up thinking about gyroscopes. As a kid scientist, gyroscopes fascinated me. Keep one spinning, and you can push a gyroscope in any direction and it will always right itself. As an adult struggling to stay balanced in the midst of turmoil, I imagined a gyroscope made of light, a tiny spiral galaxy spinning inside my own belly, supplying a steadying energy. The image of something inside me that can respond to – but not be uprooted by – external forces seemed to exactly fit how I wanted to be with my clients. When I have remembered this spiral galaxy gyroscope spinning inside me, I am energized by the end of the day. I think we can all use a spiral galaxy gyroscope, or something very much like it, to stabilize us, moment to moment, as we navigate life’s ups and downs. We need to move where events take us, but we also need to find our way back to center.
But sometimes, an image – even a powerful one – isn’t enough. To keep on keeping on through difficult times, many of us need a more powerful, more action-oriented, metaphor. We need a personal flywheel.
A flywheel is a heavy disk that rotates evenly in response to repeated applications of kinetic energy. In an automobile, the flywheel translates the jerky explosions of an internal combustion engine into vibration-free motion. A spinning disk that maintains an even flow of energy shows up in many places in the physical world. Another example is the potter’s wheel, whose mass enables it to translate the craftsman’s periodic kicks into the steady rotation needed to create symmetrical bowls, platters, and similar wares.
As a therapist, I often help people find their personal flywheels. By that I mean an interest or passion that is not part of a job, a chore, or something to do for friends or family, but an activity we do just for ourselves, independent of time, season, or circumstance. Even when only intermittent energy is applied, a personal flywheel keeps us going in the midst of difficulties, smoothing out the vibrations. No matter what’s going on, somewhere inside us the wheel keeps spinning, spinning, and all we have to do is give it a little kick to keep it going. Then the flywheel’s momentum keeps us going until we have a chance to catch our breath.
For the last several years, my work in photography, especially the Flower Mandalas, has been my personal flywheel. But a personal flywheel can be anything you feel passionate about. For some it is a spiritual connection and the activities associated with it, whether they are participating in a religious community or observing their own private rituals. For others, it’s a physical activity – working out, doing yoga, playing a sport for the sheer joy of it. Outdoor activities such as gardening, hiking, boating, or fishing may also fill that role, as can a vast range of hobbies and avocations.
What is important is that the activity be meaningful to you and that you do it, rain or shine, whether you are tired or full of energy, giving the wheel a little kick whenever you can to keep it spinning smoothly and your balance intact.
More anon,
– David
David J. Bookbinder
From Paths to Wholeness: Fifty-Two Flower Mandalas
Print: Amazon – BookBaby – B&N – Books-a-Million
eBook: Kindle – Nook – iTunes – Kobo
Also available:
52 (more) Flower Mandalas: An Adult Coloring Book for Inspiration and Stress Relief
52 Flower Mandalas: An Adult Coloring Book for Inspiration and Stress Relief
Paths to Wholeness: Selections (free eBook)
Follow my blog with Bloglovin’
Images and text Copyright 2017, David J. Bookbinder
http://www.transformationspress.org
http://www.davidbookbinder.com
http://www.flowermandalas.org
February 21, 2017
Balance: A Mini-Lesson on Mini Self-Care
NOTE: This post is about how to take care of yourself when you’re too pressed for time for normal self-care. But first, some back story.
In the summer of 1979, after two of my roommates were mugged and I narrowly escaped the knife myself, I left Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant for parts unknown.
I’d arrived in New York five years earlier with two books, two cameras, and a knapsack full of clothes, but by the time I left Brooklyn I’d accumulated a small U-Haul truck’s worth of possessions. With two Parisian friends, I loaded up my collection of books, tools, photography equipment, random bits of furniture, and a Yamaha 200 motorcycle into a rental truck. We drove across New York State to Buffalo, where I dropped everything off at my mother’s house – including the Parisians, who were continuing their trek across America.
A few days later, I flew to London to begin a two-month trip through the UK and Europe, to be followed by a three-month residence at an artist colony in Virginia, where I hoped to figure out where I’d settle next.
Two days before my return flight from Brussels, Belgium, the airline I had planned to take home went out of business. The next flight I could get a seat on was a week away, and I was short of enough American Express Travelers Cheques to buy another ticket.
But fear not! I’d worked my way through college and supported myself in New York City by doing a variety of construction jobs, and one of the trades I’d learned was roofing. And as it luck would have it – or so I thought – the brother of the friend I was staying with was a roofer.
When I left New York, I had sworn off construction work, figuring that if I continued I’d end up missing a thumb or walking with a limp. But this job was low stress, and actually fun. Although the Belgian materials and techniques were a little different from what I’d used, the work itself was essentially the same and within a day I was keeping up with the rest of the crew. I made more than enough that week to pay for the flight home.
Toward the end of my stay at the Virginia artist colony three months later, I was still without a next destination. An opportunity arose to extend my stay by helping to build new artist residences. “Why not?” I thought. Nothing bad had happened during my brief job in Belgium, and this job, too, looked like fun.
Three weeks into it, I had my answer in the form of two ruptured disks. The days of supporting myself with construction work were now behind me and I had to find another way to keep bread on the table and my writing and photography habit alive.
I’d spent my childhood as a kid scientist and my first year of college as a Cornell engineer. I knew that if push ever came to shove, I could work with computers. When I recovered from the back injury enough to become mobile again, I enrolled in a crash course in computer programming at Boston University.
And this is where mini self-care comes in.
The B.U. program packed a minor in Computer Science into one summer school session. Material for each course that would normally would have taken a semester to cover was squeezed into seven days. It was a brutal academic experience unlike any I’d experienced. Every day packed in two weeks’ worth of coursework: Each evening was our “weekend,” and each weekend a virtual semester break.
However, the program came with unintended benefits. Besides learning the fundamentals of everything from hardware architecture to LISP (the original language of artificial intelligence), I stumbled, inadvertently, on mini self-care.
Inside my maelstrom of computer intensity, in order to stay sane I looked for small, quiet spaces in which to recover. I took short walks from the computer buildings to the main campus, where for a few minutes I’d gaze out at the boats and ducks on the Charles River. I took five-minute coffee breaks. I brought a paperback novel with me and read a few pages during lunch. Unlike my classmates who lived nearby and spent most of the night toiling at computer terminals in the lab, each evening I walked back to Cambridge for a return to normality and a few hours of sleep.
Of the 24 men and women who began the program, I was one of only eight who completed it. I believe my improvised mini self-care had something to do with it.
Mini self-care is the abridged version of full-sized self-care.
Many of us have evolved a set of activities that help us feel balanced and relaxed and that allow us to recuperate from stress. We might have a hobby, take trips or vacations, practice yoga, meditate, binge-watch a television series, hike or take walks, swim, play a sport, garden, go for a ride, and so on. We do these things regardless of whatever else is going on in our lives, and they help to restore equilibrium when the tensions of work, health or family problems – or even a bad winter – wear us down.
But what can we do when we don’t have time for any of that? When even half an hour of yoga or a 15-minute walk seems like yet another burden in an already overburdened day, and a week-long vacation feels like an impossible dream?
We’re wired to handle short-term stress, but when stress is continuous for too long, the constant flow of the stress hormones adrenaline, cortisol, and norepinephrine takes a toll. When we reach a point where there’s nothing left to give, we “burn out.”
Burnout leads to feelings of hopelessness, depression, apathy, and physical and emotional exhaustion. It hampers work, home life, health, and undermines most of what we find satisfying in our lives.
The optimal way to avoid burnout is to reduce the stress and weave back into our lives what we find restorative. However, when time pressures won’t allow that strategy, an almost-as-good alternative is mini self-care. Although mini self-care may not be as reinvigorating as the longer forms, it will help to withstand the stress.
Some examples:
Self-care: You do yoga for self-restoration. Mini self-care: Pick one pose and do it for a couple of minutes two or three times a day.
Self-care: You like to walk or run. Mini self-care: Take a five-minute walk around the block.
Self-care: You like spending an hour at the end of the day reading. Mini self-care: Carry a book with you and read a couple of pages at regular intervals two or three times throughout the day.
Self-care: You like to talk with friends on the phone. Mini self-care: Exchange short texts throughout the day.
Self-care: You take two-week vacation trips. Mini self-care: Spend a night away on the weekend. If you can’t take a night, walk downtown and pretend you’re a tourist.
And so on.
Mini self-care isn’t a permanent replacement for the full version, but many find it helpful not only in warding off burnout, but in feeling more balanced in times of stress.
To create your own mini self-care plan:
Make a list of the things you do that feel restorative
Figure out the shortest version that still feels meaningful. The 80/20 rule often applies: you can get 80% of the benefit from self-care activities by spending 20% of the time you’d really like to spend.
Decide when to do your mini self-care. Mini self-care is more effective if it’s incorporated into a routine. Schedule some activities for morning, do some at lunch, and do others in the evening.
Add randomized mini self-care. Do one self-care activity randomly throughout the day. For instance, several of my clients who meditate use an app that makes a gong tone or buzzes to signal them to stop what they’re doing and take three long, slow breaths. The slow breaths interrupt what they are doing just long enough for them to get a fresh perspective. But you could instead stretch, go for a quick walk, drink a glass of water, or just zone out for a minute — whatever feels like self-care for you.
It’s been decades since I last nailed down a shingle or wrote a line of code, but mini self-care continues to be helpful in burnout prevention, which is common in my profession. Although I’m not as diligent as I could be about my morning, lunchtime, and evening mini self-care routines, when I practice them, body, mind, and spirit all hum along much more smoothly, regardless of the level or duration of stress.
More anon,
– David
David J. Bookbinder
Paths to Wholeness: Fifty-Two Flower Mandalas
Print: Amazon – BookBaby – B&N – Books-a-Million
eBook: Kindle – Nook – iTunes – Kobo
Also available:
52 (more) Flower Mandalas: An Adult Coloring Book for Inspiration and Stress Relief
52 Flower Mandalas: An Adult Coloring Book for Inspiration and Stress Relief
Paths to Wholeness: Selections (free eBook)
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Images and text Copyright 2017, David J. Bookbinder
http://www.transformationspress.org
http://www.davidbookbinder.com
http://www.flowermandalas.org
February 15, 2017
Publishing and Self-Publishing: Next Steps
NOTE: This is the second in a series of occasional posts on my ongoing adventures and misadventures in self-publishing. Had I known what I’m posting here and will post in occasional future pieces on publishing, this journey would have been a far less rocky road! (Our regular programming will resume shortly.)
Regardless of whether you are planning to self-publish or are getting published by a traditional publisher, these are a few things it would be good for you to do before – preferably long before – your books are published.
1. Influencers. Gather together the names, addresses, and email addresses of the influencers you know so you can send them review copies of your book a) to create blurbs for your book and b) so they can review the book shortly before it goes live. Influencers include anyone who has a following, such as book reviewers, bloggers, other writers, or people who are fans of your writing and who connect and network well. (I think of these people as “connectors,” and many of us have people who are skilled at that in our lives.)
2. Minions. Gather together the names and email addresses of your “minions” (friends, fans of your writing, helpful family members) so you can find out if they want to be on board your launch team. The launch team will receive pre-release versions of the book so they can leave reviews on Amazon and Goodreads as soon as the book is launched, and they will share info about your book among the people they know. They may also do other promotional tasks, such as ordering the book from their local libraries to induce the libraries to buy copies.
3. Everybody. Gather together the names and email addresses of everybody you know so they can be informed of upcoming launches, sales, events, etc. They might also buy books, leave reviews, order from their libraries, etc.
4. Buy Your First 1000 Copies by Tim Grahl and read it. Of all the book launch and book promotion stuff I’ve read in the past year, it’s the simplest, clearest, and also most generally applicable map of the process I’ve encountered. Grahl’s book will give you his ideas on how and when to use the lists of names in items 1, 2, and 3 above.
None of these tasks should take a big chunk of your time, and they are all best done months before the book actually comes out.
If you already have a previous book published, you should also:
5. Amazon. Join Amazon Author Central and set up your Author Page. While logged into your Amazon account, search for one of your books, click on your author name, and you should be directed to your existing Author Page. There, you should find a link for claiming the page as yours and updating the book information and author bio. If you don’t yet have a book on Amazon, you will have to wait until the book’s pre-release period to do this.
6. Goodreads. Join Goodreads and apply to be a Goodreads Author. The Goodreads process is similar to that on Amazon (who owns Goodreads) if you already have a book on Goodreads. If you don’t have a book listed there, you can add your book and then claim the author page once the book is in its pre-release period.
Becoming familiar with the structure and functions of the author pages as early in the process as you can will make it much easier to clean up the inevitable errors in your book descriptions, author bio, and other fields, and to format the pages so they are most inviting to future readers.
More anon,
– David
David J. Bookbinder
P.S. There’s a new review of Paths to Wholeness on the site “Reader’s Favorite”: https://readersfavorite.com/book-review/paths-to-wholeness
Paths to Wholeness: Fifty-Two Flower Mandalas
Print: Amazon – BookBaby – B&N – Books-a-Million
eBook: Kindle – Nook – iTunes – Kobo
Also available:
52 (more) Flower Mandalas: An Adult Coloring Book for Inspiration and Stress Relief
52 Flower Mandalas: An Adult Coloring Book for Inspiration and Stress Relief
Paths to Wholeness: Selections (free eBook)
Images and text Copyright 2017, David J. Bookbinder
http://www.transformationspress.org
http://www.davidbookbinder.com
http://www.flowermandalas.org
February 8, 2017
Balancing the Books
From late spring to early autumn, 1971, I hitchhiked across the United States, following a meandering loop west from Buffalo to Berkeley, south past L.A., up the coasts of California, Oregon, and Washington, and back east through Canada. I was on a mission not only to see the country, but also to find out who I was.
I hitchhiked to force myself to connect, if only for a lift to the next town or to find somewhere to crash for the night. On the journey, a new goal emerged: to develop the parts of myself I knew must be there, because they resonated when I encountered them in others, but to which I had no access. In the largest sense of the term, I took that trip to achieve balance.
Balance is a word with many meanings, in many contexts. But in May, 1971, to me it meant to bring out the latent parts of myself and mate them with what was already there and, in so doing, to become someone whole and complete.
I discovered that I had an incomplete view of who I was during my freshman year as an engineering student at Cornell University. I had grown up a kid scientist, obsessed with the workings of the natural and technical worlds, and my hope was that I’d graduate with a degree in Electrical Engineering and work for NASA. In an Introduction to English Literature course, I read the long poem “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” by William Blake.
Though by then I had witnessed Woodstock and dabbled in sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll, I was vaguely aware that I spent most of my time in my head and lived hardly at all in the realms of emotion and the body. Blake’s poem reached out forcefully, over hundreds of years and thousands of miles, with the message that, if I continued on my present course, I would live out my days as a shadow. His potent words and vivid images not only prompted me to drop out of engineering, but set me on a lifelong journey of self-actualization.
The next summer, I began my cross-country trip with $400 and a sense of longing and adventure. I returned with 25 cents in my pocket and an expanded outlook. My travels had included many adventures I still vividly recall, but more important, they also more clearly revealed the unrealized facets of myself I wanted to develop.
Within days of my return, I made a literal list of new activities to undertake. On it were writing, photography, learning a trade, practicing a sport, pursuing a spiritual activity, and, to carry on the traveler’s sense of adventure, motorcycling. This list became the curriculum for a program to rebalance myself that, in a more nuanced way, I’m still following today.
That semester, I began to carry out my curriculum, setting aside physics and calculus courses and exchanging them for the humanities, and seeking out activities that would, I hoped, enhance the physical, emotional, spiritual, and creative sides. I took all the literature, philosophy, psychology, and creative writing courses I could fit into my schedule. I read novels not only for the stories, but for what the authors could teach me about how to be human. I volunteered at a mental hospital and at a faculty-run free school for elementary-age children. I learned the carpentry trade and used it to put myself through school and, for several years after graduation, to support my new writing and photography habits. I taught myself metalworking and began making knives as a hobby. I started to learn tennis, bought a motorcycle, practiced Transcendental Meditation.
Other books followed Blake’s. I began to read seriously in Hinduism, Buddhism, Sufism, and the works of the Armenian-Russian mystic G. I. Gurdjieff. Within the field of my new major, English Literature, I doubled down on literature classes with a psychoanalytic focus, which led to my first foray into psychotherapy, where I delved into a childhood I had unwittingly pushed aside by forgetting everything that had happened to me before age 10.
Books, my refuge as a child, have often been the first step into activities that have extended me. Before I looked for a job as an apprentice carpenter, I read books on carpentry and woodworking. Before I volunteered at a state mental hospital, I read seminal writings of psychologists from Sigmund Freud to Fritz Perls. Before I put torch to carbon steel to make my first knife, I read a book on metallurgy. Before I taught my first class, I read books on pedagogy. Even after a near-death experience in 1993 permanently altered the way I think and feel, books were what I went to in order to begin to understand who I had become, and it was a book by Carl Rogers that convinced me I could become a therapist.
The cycle of reading/acting/reading/acting has continued to this day.
I have almost no sense of direction, but I’m very good at reading maps, and books are, for me, the most elaborate and detailed maps to just about everything. In my travels through time since my trip across the United States, they have guided me into places I would never have ventured without their gentle prodding.
More anon,
– David
David J. Bookbinder
Paths to Wholeness: Fifty-Two Flower Mandalas
Print: Amazon – BookBaby – B&N – Books-a-Million
eBook: Kindle – Nook – iTunes – Kobo
Also available:
52 (more) Flower Mandalas: An Adult Coloring Book for Inspiration and Stress Relief
52 Flower Mandalas: An Adult Coloring Book for Inspiration and Stress Relief
Paths to Wholeness: Selections (free eBook)
Images and text Copyright 2017, David J. Bookbinder
http://www.transformationspress.org
http://www.davidbookbinder.com
http://www.flowermandalas.org
February 1, 2017
Adventures/Misadventures in the Book Trade (and a price promotion)
Thanks to your recent survey responses, I’m starting to work on an expanded piece on Balance and will be rolling it out, post by post, soon. I would be happy to include stories from you on how you maintain balance. Email me, or post your story as a comment to the blog version of this and subsequent posts, here: http://davidbookbinder.com/photoblog
Meanwhile, I’d like to convey some of what I’ve learned so far in my decades-long adventures and misadventures in publishing and self-publishing. This post is an overview. From time to time, I’ll go into more detail on the various stages of this process, and also of my experiences in traditional publishing.
But before I get to that, I’d like to announce a price promotion. The Kindle version of my book Paths to Wholeness: Fifty-Two Flower Mandalas is now on sale for the next week at the rock-bottom price of $2.99. Get ’em while they’re hot! Tell your friends and family! Here’s the link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B01NAAFU3S
Traditional Publishing
My history in traditional publishing has been a rocky one. Although the focus of this post is self-publishing, here’s a bit of background on my experiences in that realm.
I started writing seriously in 1974, shortly after I moved to Manhattan with a B.A. in English and no clear ideas what to do next.
I worked as a freelance reporter and photographer for several small newspapers and then, at 26, came heartbreakingly close to a major break: publishing a book of photographs and stories about people who lived, worked, and performed on the streets of Manhattan and Brooklyn. The editorial board at Scribners approved the book and wanted to give me a $10,000 advance – huge at that time. But the company head, Charles Scribner IV, read it when he returned from a London business trip and killed it. “Into every life a little rain must fall,” my agent told me. “Such a book should never be published,” Scribner had told my editor.
A few years later, a Paris publisher wanted to translate the Street People book into French and include it in a series of “outsider” books named after the Périphérique, the highway that divides Paris from its suburbs. My motto until then had always been, “Don’t count on it until the check clears,” but the contract was signed and the advance check cleared. Then the editor, who suffered from undiagnosed bipolar disorder, sunk first into a deep depression and, a few months later, disappeared. My book sat in limbo for two years, partly translated, until the new editor trashed the series and started one of his own.
I’ve had better luck with books I cared far less about – in 1979, a book about American folk music published by a division of Simon & Schuster, and in 1989-91, three books about computer software published by Addison-Wesley. But the books that have had meaning to me have languished in anonymity, while the ones I was less attached to have made it to the light of day.
Self-Publishing
Self-publishing seems, on the surface, to solve a major problem for authors by doing away with the “gatekeepers” and providing a direct link from author to retailer. Like most things in life, however, self-publishing is a good news / bad news proposition.
The good news
The good news is that self-publishing has come a long way from the vanity presses of yore.
Thanks to the innovations of Print on Demand (POD), you no longer have to go to a vanity publisher, buy 1000 books, and try to sell them to bookstores, often ending up with hundreds of unsold copies moldering in your garage. POD means the book doesn’t get printed until someone orders it, so there’s no need to stock inventory. And because it’s a largely automated process, printing a book doesn’t have to cost you anything but time! If you can handle the cover creation, editing, and preproduction stages yourself, the production cost is $0.00.
If you are publishing a book with a black-and-white interior and are willing to focus mainly on Amazon, the process is pretty easy even if your computer skills are limited mainly to using Microsoft Word.
Amazon’s CreateSpace division provides templates, relatively simple tutorials, a helpful user forum, and an extremely helpful staff that will walk you through any of the issues you encounter in the process of turning a file into a book. Within a few days, you can take your masterpiece from a file on your computer to seeing it listed on Amazon’s website. You get started here: http://www.createspace.com/
Ebooks, too, can be easily produced for $0.00. For eBooks, the process of using Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing interface is also relatively simple and even faster than CreateSpace. In less than a day, you can go from a properly formatted file created in Microsoft Word to published Kindle book. You get started here: https://kdp.amazon.com/
The not as good news
For print books, things get more complicated if you introduce any of the following variables: color printing, nonstandard sizes, distribution to non-Amazon outlets.
Color printing greatly increases the cost. You can sell a 200-page 6″x9″ paperback with a color cover and black-and-white text on Amazon for $5.99 and still make a small profit. The same book with a color interior – whether there’s just one color photograph or color on every page – has to list for at least $24.99 to make a profit. If you are printing mainly for yourself and friends and family, the cost to you is much less, but if your aims for distribution are wider, it’s hard to be competitively priced compared to offerings by traditional publishers.
Non-standard sizes usually cost more, and although they won’t affect Amazon distribution, distributing a non-standard-sized book (like, for instance, the 8.5″ x 8.5″ coloring book Mary O’Malley and I did, 52 (more) Flower Mandalas) dumps you out of Amazon’s expanded distribution to other online resellers and (potentially) to bookstores and libraries. There is a workaround – you can create a duplicate version of the book through the IngramSpark program – but the process of getting from manuscript to finished book is considerably more complicated and there’s far less handholding.
The worse news
Once you move into higher-quality books that contain illustrations, things get dicier as a self-publisher.
Stepping up in paper quality from a standard 50lb matte paper like that found in most trade paperbacks to a thicker and/or glossy paper stock like that found in coffee-table books changes the game dramatically. Amazon and IngramSpark are no longer options. You have to go to the few printers out there who can handle better paper, and you have to figure out a way to get those books to market.
Offset printing. You can get excellent printing in China or Iceland, and the cost per book is reasonable, but you need to buy 1000 at a time, which can leave you with the “hundreds-of-books-moldering-in-the-garage” problem unless you are very good at marketing and promotion and have a book in one of the genres that do well in self-publishing. (More on that in another post.)
Print on Demand. If you stick to POD, many of the options are very expensive per copy. When I did the Kickstarter version of Paths to Wholeness, the hardcover 12″x 12″ edition of the book cost me about $200 per book on Blurb.com, and the smaller paperback would have cost about $65 had I gone with Blurb or most of the other POD printers of photography books.
Instead I went with newcomer BookBaby, one of the few POD outfits that not only prints color books at a more reasonable (but still high compared to offset) cost, but also provides a distribution package to get the printed book onto online retailers and, at least in theory, into bookstores. The catch is that the retailers take a large chunk of the profit. Between BookBaby’s fees for printing and distributing, and Amazon’s fees for letting me sell the book there, my $40 Paths to Wholeness book earns me $1.32/book. And a $40 book is not an easy sell.
The bad news (unless you have a knack for it)
Which brings me to the bad news, unless you have a gift for it: marketing and promotion.
Sometimes self-publishing works out amazingly well for authors. The Martian, for instance, began as a blog, then a self-published book, and eventually rose to become a major motion picture starring Matt Damon and directed by Ridley Scott, my all-time favorite science fiction director! Authors writing mainly in the romance, science fiction, thriller, and to a lesser extent the new “get-rich-quick-on-the-Internet” genres sometimes also do remarkably well as self-publishers, especially if they turn out multiple books in quick succession.
For many, however, it’s an uphill struggle. The average lifetime sales of self-published books is estimated at about 250 copies.
Why? Because it’s so easy to publish a book now, it’s very hard to distinguish your book from the literally millions of other books out there. The most successful authors not only have a string of books, they have a well-defined market that they know how to reach.
But this is getting long. So, more on the ins and outs of genre, distribution, marketing, and promotion (as I’ve experienced them so far) another time.
Meanwhile, please check out the eBook version of Paths to Wholeness, now on sale for one week at the discounted price of $2.99 on Amazon.
Pass the word around and help me get the word out to more than that estimated 250 people!
More anon,
– David
David J. Bookbinder
Paths to Wholeness: Fifty-Two Flower Mandalas
Print: Amazon – BookBaby – B&N – Books-a-Million
eBook: Kindle – Nook – iTunes – Kobo
Also available:
52 (more) Flower Mandalas: An Adult Coloring Book for Inspiration and Stress Relief
52 Flower Mandalas: An Adult Coloring Book for Inspiration and Stress Relief
Paths to Wholeness: Selections (free eBook)
Images and text Copyright 2017, David J. Bookbinder
http://www.transformationspress.org
http://www.davidbookbinder.com
http://www.flowermandalas.org
January 26, 2017
Action
At times I feel like a Sherlock Holmes of the mind, each of my clients the faithful and resourceful Watson of his or her own unsolved mystery.
A Holmes-like insight is the province of traditional psychotherapy, and it is often a helpful tool. Insight can clarify the causes of anxiety or depression, relieve guilt and shame, explicate the roots of trauma, and point the way to new and better lives. But insight alone is seldom enough to effect lasting change. And, as one of my former professors remarked, “Sometimes insight is the last defense.”
In therapy, as in life, actions are more powerful than words. Identifying dysfunctional patterns, self-sabotaging thoughts, and triggered feelings that keep us prisoners of our problems is an important, even vital, preparatory step, but for significant growth, we need, also, to change what we do.
Psychologist Jim Grant envisions our collections of patterned thoughts, feelings, and behaviors as akin to a Spell that can lead us to act in ritualized, self-defeating ways. To break the Spell, we need to alter our actions. Even a slight shift in an old pattern opens the way for future growth that no amount of additional insight, by itself, can foster.
For example, addicts typically follow a limited but compelling set of commands such as: “Once I get the idea in my head, I have to get high,” or “If I’m around it, I have to do it,” or “Getting high is the only thing I have to look forward to.” In therapy, addicts can identify triggers, challenge addiction-related thoughts, and work through the feelings that entrap them in addictive behaviors. But to break the addiction Spell, they also have to act differently, “faking it till they make it” even when every conscious thought and habituated emotion is screaming at them to use. They must, to paraphrase Eleanor Roosevelt, do the thing they think they cannot do.
What holds true for addiction applies to any of the maladies that bring people to therapy. Each of us has our own patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior, and each requires not just insights – words and ideas – but also actions to replace dysfunctional patterns with new, more fulfilling ways to be in the world.
Of course, acting differently is much easier said than done.
When I was a junior in college, I took a class in the writings and teachings of the Armenian-Russian mystic G. I. Gurdjieff. One of Gurdjieff’s chief precepts was that most of us live in a waking dream, believing we are far more in control of our fates than we really are. The other students and I rejected this notion – we were, after all, the generation that would change the world! So our instructor challenged us with what seemed, at first, like trivial attempts at behavior modification.
Our first assignment was around eating. If we normally cleaned our plates at each meal, he said, we were to leave a bite behind, and vice versa. This task seemed undemanding, but in the week between classes, none of us succeeded in accomplishing it more than once or twice. Humbled but unbroken, we theorized that eating behaviors might be too deeply ingrained for an initial experiment. So next time, he let us choose. I decided to use my left hand for something I normally did with my right – opening doors – and on the way out I confidently opened the classroom door left-handed. By our next meeting, I was not so confident. I’d remembered the assignment only for that night. Score: Habit 2, David 0.
Or so I believed at the time.
What I hadn’t realized then, but understand now, is that although little had changed, I had changed something. I did remember to leave a bite on my plate at least once, and I had opened at least one door – the classroom door – with my non-dominant hand. I just hadn’t sustained the changes. Now, after witnessing hundreds of people better their lives by learning to act differently, I know that even a single exception to a dysfunctional pattern can be more potent than dozens of repetitions. Each exception makes more exceptions possible, opening the door (with either hand) to a new direction.
I have been drawn to action-oriented schools of therapy, and I use them with my clients, but psychotherapy is not the only way to break a Spell. All we need is a method that empowers us to recognize self-defeating patterns, to identify what those patterns want us to do, and to choose, through any means available, to do otherwise. And then, above all, to repeat the change again and again, as often as we can remember, until it becomes the way we live.
From: Paths to Wholeness: Fifty-Two Flower Mandalas
Buy on: Amazon – BookBaby – B&N – Books-a-Million (print version)
Buy on: Kindle – Nook – iTunes – Kobo (eBook version)
Also available:
52 (more) Flower Mandalas: An Adult Coloring Book for Inspiration and Stress Relief
52 Flower Mandalas: An Adult Coloring Book for Inspiration and Stress Relief
Paths to Wholeness: Selections (free eBook)
Images and text Copyright 2017, David J. Bookbinder
http://www.transformationspress.org
http://www.davidbookbinder.com
http://www.flowermandalas.org
