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A New You

I am searching for a new body. I am like many on that journey. My impetus for this search is the chronic pain that my husband feels.

My husband has been experiencing chronic pain for more than fifteen years. After experimenting with almost all treatment modalities from traditional Western medicine to unusual non-traditional practices, he has almost given up. With a vacation coming up that would be so much more enjoyable if we could, at least, reduced the level of pain that he feels every day. Enter the Hippocratic thought, “Let food be your medicine, and the medicine be your food.”

Navigating the nutritional forest to find a credible anti-inflammatory plan can feel like walking through the trees without a compass or a map.

After deciding on the path–let food be your medicine–for healing, I discovered some ground rules. They are, from Michael Pollan’s Food Rules: 1. Eat food; 2. Not too much; 3. Mainly plants.

Alberto Villoldo‘s book, Grow A New Body, found it’s way to my reading pile. Dr. Villoldo takes a holistic, grounded approach to use the body’s natural ability to heal through eating the right foods and being connected to your spirit.

And we started, we are working through the pre-work to set the body up to win. If nothing else, if the pain is not reduced, the program has improved our energy, elevated our mood, and reduced our brain fog. It is a win for us. We are finding that this eating practice is something that we want to continue.

Is this the only program we could have tried. No. I have three other cookbooks and, at least, two other lifestyle books that speak to the same philosophy and actions.

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More Tools For Improvement

As a coach, I have shelves full of self-help, personal development, and life-affirming inspirational books. They usually come from recommendations, curiosity, or the need to find an answer–or another answer. The Tools by Phil Stutz & Barry Michels came from all of those incentives. Brian Johnson of Optimize.me often extols the value of Stutz’s Tools, and I am often looking for an exercise that might help my clients.

This book provides simple and profound tools to inspire us to have a great day, every day. There was one tool that was really a knock on the side of the head reminding me that I probably have most of the answers already. I need to practice them.

The tool is called Jeopardy. The chapter on this tools starts with a persuasive argument:

This book puts a special power in your hands–the power to change your life. There’s only one thing you need to do–use the tools. As a reward for doing this, you’ll discover a better and newer version of yourself. Who doesn’t want that?

I certainly assumed my patients did. The tools I gave them worked as promised; they became more confident and creative, more expressive and courageous. The results were so good, I was completely shocked by what happened next: almost every patient stopped using them. I was stupefied. I’d shown my patients the path to a new life and, for no good reason, they’d stepped off it–even the most enthusiastic ones quit.

pg 181, The Tools, Phil Stutz & Barry Michels

Convicted. I have shelves full of similar books. They all promise a better life and all we need to do is use the information that is inside.

This is one of the few books, of its genre, that I am determined not to collect dust. To help me practice using their tools, I have installed a habit. When writing my daily plan in the morning, I add at least one of the tools to my to-do list (grateful flow and active love are easy ones to incorporate). Now, in order to complete my day, I need to check it off as done or I need to move it to the next day where I am reminded to do it. And, I don’t let two days go by when I have not practiced using the tool.

These small practices have brought some extra sunshine into my world. And I will have to see what other tools on my shelf that can fuel my growth.

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Ehrengard: Strongly Feminine

Some books arrive on my book shelf by mysterious means. I suspect I picked this one up to discover the magic of Isak Dinesen’s writing. She is also known as Karen Blixen of “Out of Africa” fame. Ehrengard is called a fairy tale on the back of book blurb. There is a stunning princess and handsome prince. This story, though, uses them as a setting for the real tale of Ehrengard.

The narrator is a court painter who sees the world with Dinesen’s painterly eye:

“Imagine to yourself that you be quietly stepping into a painting by Claude Lorrain, and that the landscape around you becomes alive with balsamic breezes wafting and violets turning the mountain sided into long gentle waves of blue…

The Goddess of Love, the Lady Venus herself, has entrusted me with the work, and I have only followed her instructions.”

pg 32 – Ehrengard

In this story, we follow Herr Cazotte around as he creates a scene where he is attempting to seduce the princess’s fair handmaiden.

I wonder, what would she be thinking as all this plays out.

Ehrengard is the only daughter from a strong military family bred in the mountains of northern Europe. Several times Herr Cazotte refers to her as an Amazon. In this scene, though, that descriptive was probably not what came to his mind because, even in the third person narration, his feelings shine through:

The great artist was gentle and courteous, if a little impersonal, in his manner with the highborn maiden. From his rich treasury of knowledge he took out for her benefit strange tales of ancient times, theories of art and life and fancies of his own on the phenomena of existence. He entertained her, too, with narrations of his own eventful life, dwelling on the days when he was a poor boy in shabby clothes, or slightly touching on his triumphs at academic and courts, and sprinkling his talk with accounts of the life of outcasts in dark streets or with bits of scandal from sublime places.

He found that the girl has read little and lent her books from his exclusive library or read out to her in the shade of the big trees. Poetry, new to her, puzzled and fascinated her. Herr Cazotte had a voice made for reciting poetry and had often been asked to read by princesses and beaux-esprits. At times he would lower the book with a finger in it and go on reciting with his eyes in the tree crowns.

On a very lovely evening he had been reading to her in the garden and was slowly accompanying her back to the house, when he stopped and made her stop with him by a foundation representing Leda and the swan and repeated a stanza from the poem they had last read together. He was silent for a while, the girl was silent with him, and as he turned toward her he found her young face very still.

“A penny for your thoughts, my Lady Ehrengard,” he said.

She looked at him, and for a moment a very slight blush slid over her face.

“I was not,” after a pause she answered him slowly and gravely, “really thinking of anything at all.”

He had no doubt that here, as ever, she was speaking the truth.

pg 52 – Ehrengard

What was she thinking? Besides, finally silence.

Herr Cazotte seems to make the assumption that she is an uneducated country maiden. Even if the girls were left to needlepoint, they were also taught the management of the household. Ehrengard would have, also, would have learned a lot from the antics of her four brothers. Much can be gleaned from watching and listening. Women have learned that well over the years. Outside of her duties, she seems quite meditative. Herr Cazotte sees her as simple. I can see her as strong, feminine and not interested in playing demeaning flirting games. I can see her statuesque figure enjoying a pastoral view when she is interrupted by a flea that she has no desire to acknowledge or to give platitudes.

I was concerned that this book would not be relevant in the age of #metoo. If we stand in Ehrengard’s character, we wee a woman who understands the world and walks her own path. It is a fairy tale where the happily ever after comes from being true to oneself.

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Are You Curious?

This is George.
He lived in Africa.
He was very happy
But he had one fault
He was too curious…

George was caught…

George was sad, but he
was still a little curious….

They took him away
and shut him in a prison.

Curiosity was in the news this past week. With the passing of Stephen Hawking, many reflected on his immense curiosity:

My goal is simple. It is a complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all.

Stephen Hawking might be a unique individual (understatement) in that he was able to retain his child-like sense of wonder throughout his life. Children, and Stephen Hawking, lack the self-consciousness that enables them to admit that they don’t know.

There are some theories as to why adults are generally less curious. It seems that we, adults, become more rigid, self-conscious and more concerned about how we are perceived by others. We might be less willing to acknowledge that we don’t know something and we resist experiences that challenge our current biases.

Or perhaps, we have been read Curious George too many times as a child creating a belief that curiosity gets you caught, in trouble and perhaps even in jail.

But curiosity is an important trait that has brought us quarks, and moon shots, and the exploration of our world. To be curious is to have

 an insatiable hunger to learn and understand everything one can about life and his/her circumstances. It is a hunger for knowledge, growth, and development that ignites passionand purpose. This, of course, requires a desire to solve problems and put ideas into action through a process of asking effective questions that allow one to adapt to life in optimal ways. (IQ Matrix)

What are you insatiably hungry to learn?