A year of therapy under my belt, emotional family situations, and a deep, deep desire for change made for the perfect storm of self-revelation this summer. I’ve gravitated towards books and television and blog posts and podcasts that will shape me for the better. I am not having a mini-crisis so much as I’m having a mini-awakening. Layers of life stuff can pile on so quickly and so quietly, we often don’t even realize our soul is under there, struggling. Or if we get a glimpse that we’re emotionally going south, who has time for that? There are bills to pay and soccer practice and I gotta get the ingredients for tomorrow night’s dinner.
So, I say this kindly and not judgmentally: not everyone is ready for a soul shift. We’re not all there yet. Surely, if someone had handed me two of these three books even a year ago - even six months ago - I would not have read them in the same way. So these books might not be what you’re looking for. I don’t recommend them to all. And I definitely peppered in lighter fare in-between. No one can handle this kind of reading all at once (or at least I can’t) because then it diminishes the effect.
But if you are looking for something that rearranges your thinking, these are the three that stick out the most from the past few month’s soul-shifting journey:
The Gifts of Imperfection by Brene Brown
By now, most of you have probably caught Brene Brown’s excellent TED talk on vulnerability or seen her on Oprah’s Super Soul Sunday (programming I love, by the way). Brene Brown has hands down changed the way I view myself and my interactions with others. One of my life mantras is “You teach people how to treat you” but I didn’t always live up to that, and in the past few years I’ve gotten worse about minimizing myself in order to please others. I don’t know why I do that sometimes. It goes against what I believe philosophically, but in action it was happening. I was letting it happen.
“The comparison mandate becomes this crushing paradox of “fit in and stand out!” It’s not cultivate self-acceptance, belonging, and authenticity; it’s be just like everyone else, but better.”
The Gifts of Imperfection is mostly about shame and vulnerability, our reaction to it and how that reaction impacts our choices. Don’t let this scare you away. Prior to reading Brown’s research work, I would have shied away from the word “shame.” I thought it only applied to those who had been through significant traumas, or those who had a lot of secrets. But the truth is that we all carry shame, once we understand better what that is. I didn’t even realize how much of my running commentary was shame-based. It’s a fascinating looks at how your own gut reactions affect how you think, and it made me better understand myself and also other people in my life. The other people part...that was almost more important than what I saw about myself. It gave me empathy and pause.
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
What to say about The Alchemist...I almost cannot do this book justice. It’s one that should be read yearly, at the least. On the surface, it’s a story about a shepherd boy who travels on foot to Egypt to find a hidden treasure. But that description doesn’t sound all that enticing to me. It’s really a story about life and God and signs and faith. It reminded me to pay attention to my heart. There are signs and markers on your path, watch for them.
That’s cryptic, but I don’t want to ruin it for you.
“...People are afraid to pursue their most important dreams, because they feel that they don’t deserve them, or that they’ll be unable to achieve them. We, their hearts, become fearful just thinking of loved ones who go away forever, or of moments that could have been good but weren’t, or of treasures that might have been found but were hidden in the sands. Because, when these things happen, we suffer terribly.‘My heart is afraid that it will have to suffer,’ the boy told the alchemist one night as they looked up at the moonless sky.
‘Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has every suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of the search is a second’s encounter with God and with eternity.’”
The Untethered Soul by Michael Singer
This book is the most woo-woo, but it’s also the one that has most impacted my daily thought process. I would have rolled my eyes big as Dallas at this book not too long ago, so roll with me or snicker.
I read this book slowly and with a pen in hand because I underlined so much. I had to take a break after every few pages, to turn around these concepts in my head. It’s not difficult reading, it’s just so much food for thought.
I felt like a child while I was reading Singer’s words about the true self. I remembered how I thought of myself when I was young, how much closer I was to my own soul before all the other voices got in there. My brain goes through hoops daily to protect myself from feeling hurt, to justify my actions, and most of it is for naught. It’s a cage.
One of the things I’ve worried with over the last year or so has been what I thought was a selfish tendency to look inward this way. Sure, seeking truth makes for a (mostly) more pleasant Laura, but when there are real, tangible hurts in the world it felt very narcissistic. This paragraph early in The Untethered Soul addresses that:
“During eons of evolution, from the simplest of living forms to the most complex, there has always been the day-to-day struggle to protect oneself. In our high evolved cooperative social structures, this survival instinct has gone through evolutionary changes. Many of us no longer lack food, water, clothing, or shelter; nor do we regularly face life-threatening physical danger. As a result, the protective energies have adapted toward defending the individual psychologically, rather than physiologically. We no experience the daily need to defend our self-concepts rather than our bodies. Our major struggles end up being with our own inner fears, insecurities, and destructive behavior patterns, and not with outside forces.”
I believe this. I see the battles we’re all facing play out between strangers on the internet and in the grocery store. This is what we’ve evolved into, and it can be an enormous place of pain and suffering. There are still physical, tangible threats present, of course, but these days from war to street violence, it’s often emotions informing these battles and not the other way around.
Most of us don’t even know how much we’re craving some inner peace. We don’t even know that such a thing is attainable. I know I chalked up some of hardest parts of my personality to chronic anxiety and in introverted nature. Those things are both factual, but they’re not the end of my sentence.
“Inner sensitivity is a symptom of non-well-being. It’s the same as when the body sends pain or displays other symptoms when it’s not well. Pain is not bad; it’s how the body talks to you. When you overeat, you get a stomachache. When you do something that puts too much stress on your arm, it starts to hurt. The body is communicating through its universal language: pain. Your psyche is communicating through its universal language: fear. Self-consciousness, jealousy, insecurity, anxiety - they are all fear.”
I have a list already going that friends and authors have recommended me for further reading on some of these topics. I couldn’t read them all the time, but sprinkling in these types of books between my usual fiction and memoir has been so good for me as I work through stuff.
What have you read that’s life-changing? Share in the comments!
*affiliate links are included in this post. This means if you click through and make any purchase, it supports this site at no additional cost to you. I use affiliates from all over the web, and they never determine my opinions or content.
