Self-help

My new book -- find it in the "self-help" section

I slept in today. Sometimes you’re just plain tired.

The roads were worse than I imagined they were going to be as I took my grandson Henry to daycare and then did that inevitable stop at the store (parking lot a mess) for the ingredient I forgot yesterday.

Now I’m baking and kind of wishing I hadn’t started with the putziest cookie first. But maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe I’d just have less energy for it later. They’re called Linger Cookies and the recipe was handwritten and handed down to me from my buddy Lou, who bakes about a thousand cookies every Christmas and then packs them up in tins and gives them to folks like me. The recipe’s on lined paper, and yellowed, and so worn that the blue ink is fading. I’ll have to re-copy it. But I’ll keep the original.

I took a book called Emotional Freedom to bed with me last night. It’s written by Dr. Judith Orloff and I like her style. A few posts back I mentioned that The Given Self was categorized as a self-help book. On the database used by O Books, there were many categories to choose from. From the first, they had The Given Self listed as “Non-duality.” That sounded okay to me. I also chose what I thought would be a few sub-categories. How it ended up with the self-help designator, I’m not sure.

I’ve never been fond of self-help, and I’ve mentioned this before. But here I am, reading a self-help book. Today it strikes me a little like my friend Lou’s recipe, and the fact that just about every year I call her about storage. Her cookies always taste like she just baked them yesterday and I can’t ever recall if she recommends freezing them or putting them in the fridge, or how she wraps them when she does. She’s baked so many cookies that she knows more than me and I’ve had enough cookies grow stale that I’d rather not have it happen again.

So I feel kind of the same way about the Emotional Freedom book. Judith is a psychiatrist and she’s worked with tons of people and she knows more than me about dealing with overflowing emotions – but here’s the most important thing: she doesn’t write like a stranger passing on information. She shares her own emotions and the challenges she’s faced, and she writes personally, and with empathy, so that it’s a little like Lou’s handwritten recipe and the way it speaks to me of more than ingredients and oven temperature.

That said, here’s the excerpt I promised from The Given Self. The spot where I say “this is not about self-help!”:

We are not self-help people in a self-help world. The change we experience has a different meaning than that of self-betterment.

We are in deep. The only ones who can help us navigate these deep waters are those who are there. We have to find each other. It’s not an “answer” we’re seeking, but this identifying.

Each person who has moved on to new knowing shows, through who they are, what they say, and how personally it is said, that they understand this new place in which we find ourselves. Where we find ourselves is not a place of higher consciousness devoid of self, but a place of self imbued with higher consciousness.

When we find each other it is imperative that we recognize the condition in which we are here. This is not a stroll in the park, or a passing fancy. It is a matter of survival: our own, and maybe even that of the planet and whole community of the living. It’s about the survival of the true self and the demise of the ego.

In other words, it’s about being who we are, and I’ve found that as a person makes their way back to themselves, they open their hearts, and often encounter, as I’m encountering, that overflow of emotions that makes you feel raw, or sensitive, or vulnerable. I haven’t got anything against raw, sensitive, or vulnerable, but those kinds of feelings can make walking the path of change that is confronting me and many of us a little more difficult than it needs to be. Anyway, I’m not trying to stop feeling what I feel, just to feel what I feel with a little more grace.

That’s a lot of what The Given Self is about and Emotional Freedom would make a good companion book if you need a little help along these lines.