constant state of flux

My inspirations have come from many sources through the years – mainly from books, music and film. A few readers have asked me to post a list of books which have influenced me on my journey. Please let me know if you would like me to review any books for you by dropping me a note in the comments box below. So, here they are:

“The Continuum Concept” by Jean Liedloff.
I was fortunate to read this five or six years before I had children. I believe that things would have been hugely different had I not come across this book. It sparked my whole attachment parenting journey and still influences me in most of my decisions regarding the kids. It is all about the continuation of traditional practices such as of child-centered rearing, co-sleeping, baby wearing and autonomous learning. Liedloff spent many years living with tribal people and observed them and their children’s behaviour at close range. She wanted to understand why the village children never cried or had a tantrum, obeyed orders without question and took total responsibility for themselves and younger children amongst other things – things that we struggle to achieve with our children today. I believe the findings of this book is absolutely crucial for modern parents to read and digest.

Thankfully when I went on to have my own children , I used the concepts in this book to guide me. Many other books were discovered in the process of investigation into the child-centered life.

I think that this book set me of on my journey of discovery back to myself and I would not have found the following books without having read this one first.

“Nutrition and Physical Degeneration” by Weston A.Price has influenced me hugely. Price travelled all over the world to study non-industrialized tribes in order to find out why they were all, without exception, physically perfect, enjoying outstanding health and living long, happy lives. His findings were really a revelation to me after wading through it seems, hundreds of theories on health that didn’t quite ring true. All his findings are what our grandmothers would call common sense; based on eons of traditional home food preparation involving locally grown, seasonal products. Stuff which I buy from the markets and local producers here in the Alps every week like raw milk, liver and organic meat. Price’s findings fit very comfortably into the bigger picture of my home life, which I hope my children will absorb through their time with me.

From the first page: “Some of the primitive races have avoided certain of the life problems faced by modernized groups and the methods and knowledge used by the primitive peoples are available to assist modernized individuals in solving their problems.”

The end of my journey to better health – it is all here. To be used in conjunction with the next book.

“Nourishing Traditions: The Cookbook That Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and the Diet Dictocrats” by Sally Fallon, which is a book that expounds Weston A.Price’s theories and apllies them to food in a cookbook which can be used in the kitchen everyday. Once all the basic methods have been learnt, it is easy to adapt other recipes to fit in with the traditional methods explained in the book. It is not about avoiding food groups, (apart from the obvious junk) in fact, the key is to continue eating a balanced diet, but it is more about discovering ways in which food was prepared in the traditional way, before fast food was invented. Grains should always be fermented, dairy eaten raw, stock utilised every day, organ meats consumed, slow crock-pots made use of. I in fact, find that the closest cuisine to this traditional way of eating is the food of France, happily, where I live now.

“A full-spectrum nutritional cookbook with a startling message–animal fats and cholesterol are vital factors in the human diet, necessary for reproduction and normal growth, proper function of the brain and nervous system, protection from disease and optimum energy levels. Includes information on how to prepare grains, health benefits of bone broths and enzyme-rich lacto-fermented foods.”

“The Metabolic Typing Diet” by William Wolcott and Trish Farhey I read this book recently and was pleasantly surprised when on the first few pages, it mentions Weston A. Price and the work that he did in discovering ‘original health’ – so I read on. After reading a book by Andreas Moritz who claimed that the healthiest diet was the vegan diet, I was left totally confused by the findings of Price and the emphasis on animal derived foods that Sally Fallon pushes through Nourishing Traditions.

This books helped me in my confusion by going one step further; it says that ‘one man’s food is another man’s poison’ and that NO food can be said to be healthy, as different metabolic types react to the same food in completely different ways. Here at last I had a book which supports the high fat, high meat diet of Fallon AND the vegan diet of Moritz.

Now I understood why native Mexicans can survive and thrive on a diet of maize and beans and the inuit of Alaska can survive exclusively on the meat and fat of sea mammals.

Metabolic Typing works by asking the patient many lifestyle and diet questions and placing them into one of three differetn types, which is categorised by the type of food suits them best. This bookd only covers the diet aspect of the typing, there are many other aspects, such as mineral deficiencies and allergies that can be diagnosed further with a NT practioner. I have set up my first NT session for the beginning of February 2012.

“Original Wisdom: Stories of an Ancient Way of Knowing” by Robert Wolff, Wolff was spending time in a tribal village in the forests of Malaysia, when he saw a shaman called Ahmeed perform an amazing ritual and he, himself went into a trance. He was led into the jungle on several occasions to follow Ahmeed on day-long treks, without food or water. During these walks Wolff was tired, hungry, thirsty and confused….”We walked all day. In the evening, back at [the village], I asked him what I should learn from these walks. He laughed loudly, which was unusual for him. “No, I am serious,” I protested. “I need to know what it is I should learn.” He chuckled and said, “It does not matter. You do not have to understand; you [will] learn.”

The walks continued, day after day. Although Wolff was getting more able to handle the hunger and thirst, he found the walks boring, although he saw beautiful new sights all around him. He started to think of the work he should be doing back in the city, his mind wandered, he became irritated. After a brief sojourn on the city, he returned to the village to resume the walks with Ahmeed. “The next day, after walking an hour, I realised that I was thinking so much that I did not pay attention to where we were, to what was going on in the environment. I was trying to figure things out in my head, making lists……….I decided instead to really open my ears, my eyes, my nose, my skin to whatever I could pick up in the jungle around us. I stopped abruptly. The jungle was suddenly dense with sounds, smells, little puffs of air here and there. I became aware of things I had largely ignored before. It was as if all this time I had been walking with dirty eyeglasses – and then someone washed them for me……but it was more than that – much more. I could smell things I had no name for. I heard little sounds that could be anything at all. I saw a leaf shivering, I saw a line of insects crawling up a tree.”

He goes on to find water pooled in a leaf, directed by this awakened sense of ‘knowing’ and nothing else: “My perception opened further. I no longer saw water – what I felt with my whole being was a leaf-with-water-in-it, attached to a plant that grew in soil surrounded by uncounted other plants, all part of a larger living skin around the earth. And nothing was separate; all was one, the same thing: water-leaf-plant-trees-soil-animals-earth-air-sunlight and little wisps of wind. The all-ness was everywhere and I was part of it. I cannot explain what went on inside of me, but I knew I had learned something unbelievably wonderful. I felt more alive than I had ever felt before. All of me was filled with being. What this other sense is I do not know. For me it is very real. I think of it as a sense of knowing. It probably is a quality we all have to a greater or lesser degree. For me it works when I can get out of my mind, when I can experience without having to understand, or name, or position, or judge, or categorize. It is a quality that has to be used or it fades away; just as one has to exercise muscles, so too knowing must be exercised. I am saying this after the fact, trying to describe something that does not fit into our western concepts, and therefore there are no words. At the time I did not think anything. I as learning how to put my mind aside and use some other sense to know. Standing over a leaf with a little water in it, somewhere in the jungles of Malaysia, I did not think in words. I did not think. I bathed in that overwhelming sense of oneness. I felt as if a light was lit deep inside me. I knew I was radiating something – love, perhaps – for this incredible world, this rich, varied, and totally interconnected world of creations that, at the same time gave love to me. And with the love, I also felt a very deep sense of belonging.

This chapter has had a lasting effect on me. Even though I read it initially about a year ago, I often refer to back to these words for direction. I read it last night after feeling heavy in my heart; feeling as if I was thinking too much, dissecting, struggling, going too fast – analysing. Suffering from all the trappings of the modern analytical mind. Something I am prone to do from time to time.

“The Amazing Liver and GallBladder Flush” by Andreas Moritz

This is a wise and wonderful book about the root cause of disease in the body and how to clear build up of toxins that have resulted from years of feeding the body ‘bad things’. Although I have not yet done a liver flush, I am at this moment doing the kidney cleanse which is a preliminary step towards the eventual liver flush which i should have completed by the end of February 2012.

Moritz describes the causes of build-up of toxins in the liver and the other eliminatory organs of the body (colon, kidneys, lungs and skin) in great detail and relates congestion in these areas to other ailments we may be suffering from, he draws mainly on Chinese and Ayuvedic medicine as his sources, but uses modern scientific research to back up his claims. I was particualry intersested to read this book as i have Gilbert’s Syndrome which is congestion of the liver, and have searched for many years for a way to rid my body of this disease.

Moritz lists many facial and body signs that indicate liver congestion in the body, I have many of these signs, including vertical lines in between my eyebrows, a stiff fourth toe and other such things such as scoliosis. He not only talks about the physical reasons behing toxic overload, but also the emotional scars too, which all in all, makes for a very interesting and worthwhile read.

“Dumbing Us Down” by John Taylor Gatto. And onto the subject of home schooling. I find it hard to imagine being able to execute all the above ideologies with my children whilst they are at mainstream school. It just doesn’t ring true. Schooling is where we now ‘learn’ most of our life skills, our prejudices, our conditioning and our behaviour in society at large. It influences subtly everything we do. We treat kids like a commodity to be shipped out wholesale, labelled, measured and tested – to finally be spat out at the other end of the machine.

It seems like grades have become more important than compassion, empathy and harmony with our fellow man. I would rather my children learnt about the latter. The best place to learn this? At home within the support of a loving and inquisitive family. All these thoughts were laid bare for me in the book  Reading this book was a life shifting experience for me. My world view changed radically after finishing it. THIS BOOK SHOULD BE TREATED WITH CAUTION: your opinion of school may change radically after reading this book – BEWARE!

“Thirty years of award-winning teaching in New York City’s public schools led John Gatto to the sad conclusion that compulsory governmental schooling does little but teach young people to follow orders as cogs in the industrial machine.”

‘Wild: An Elemental Journey’ – by Jay Griffiths

Written in the style of a travelogue, but touching on elements of women and nature and the suppression of both (as witnessed by the destruction of the earth’s wilderness and the destruction of  the ‘wild woman’ at the hands of our male-dominated society) this book moves through the different elements, Earth, Water, Fire and Ice as Griffiths goes on a personal journey to find out what truly remains wild within our landscape and our selves.

She spends time with Inuits and Amazonian tribes people and with the people of war-ravaged Papua. As a women, she has a different way of looking at the land, one from the persepctive of these tribes people. She gets into their way of life, their legends and stories in a way that, as she admits, fully respects their sacredness despite the fact that no Westerner can truly understand it.

As she is  amongst these people, she becomes part of the fragile spider’s web of a life which depends solely on the land for all its sustenance  – both physical and spiritual, another thing we in the modern world have lost sight of. In addition to this, she compares the life of these people to lands before they were ‘discovered’ and she reports on what life in these places is like now after being conquered and the struggle of the old ones to keep some kind of ancient way of life going in the midst of  TV’s and supermarkets, (where, in the far North the land becomes ‘hot’) missionaries and civil wars, guerilla fighting and villages built on mounds of rubbish.

I was moved and brought to tears several times whilst reading her accounts of the atrocities the natives (especially the women) suffered at the hands of the conquering men who pushed on through virgin lands to maim and destroy every indigenous person who crossed their path, in the name of claiming dominion over the pure body of wilderness.

One thing that especially enraged me was the fact that American National Parks were set up in the 18th Century as a place of wild beauty, but in doing so, the native people who lived within the perimeters of the parks were forcefully removed and forbidden to return to their lands on pain of death. I wonder how many Americans and other tourists visiting these parks every year, truly understand the sacrifice made by these people for the ‘pleasurement’ of the conquerors?

Throughout the book Griffiths makes comparisons between the rape of the land and the suppression of women, using quotations from the original writings of the men who penetrated these wild lands to displace the indigenous people, highlighting the metaphors that in history have been used to simultaneously denote the fear of the wildness of women and wilderness and the need to destroy or at least tame both of them.

This book started me on the journey to my own wildness. In the last chapter, Griffiths is holed up in a Tibetan monastery, grief-stricken with depression after the break up of a long standing relationship and as she starts to observe the various characters around her – the devout monk, the comical shaman – a new ray of hope breaks into her writing for the land, women and her own psyche. She finds wisdom in the way of the fool and her own wildish woman with a kind of strong humour that we had only before glimpsed in her, lying somewhere under the surface throughout the rest of the book. It is as if she gets wise to her own seriousness, her own desperate search for wildness out there somewhere, her own desperation at needing to know a definitive answer to all this. She at last, becomes tired of analysis, of searching to abate her angst at the desperate plight of the earth and its inhabitants today and sees that it all starts with a belly laugh; it truly starts with the small act of reclaiming the hidden wildish power within women, wherever that woman may be in her life right now. This book certainly inspired me to do so.

‘Women and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her’ – by Susan Griffin

What can I say about this book? Well, it was one of the most emotional and gut-wrenching introductions to feminism I think anyone could have had. At once poetic and deeply moving, Women and Nature continues a ‘conversation’ between men and women throughout the book.

It starts with the voice of man, making discoveries, charting ‘laws’ laid down by the early church and scientists beginning in the 1300′s, great thinkers, philosophers and philanthropists as they try to come to terms with the nature of ‘matter’. The woman’s voice at this point is silent.

We reach a climax with the present day (1970′s) and the discovery of nuclear fission, plutonium and the destruction of Hiroshima. Matter has been divided and dissected and reduced and destroyed to the point of total power of man over nature, giving man effectively, the power to destroy the world.

It is here that the man’s voice becomes that of a child, scared in the dark, waiting for his mother to come to him in the night and sit with him until he falls asleep. Now, we start to hear the voice of a woman. The book’s tone then slowly changes  from the all dominating voice of men to the quiet and uncertain voice of women, taking us through the witchcraft trials, the woman as caged animal and domesticated slave, suppressed of emotion, vigour and passion, treated as sinner and temptress, to be tortured and killed at a man’s whim. The narrative gets stronger, the women find their voice, their power, their story, The voice of the man dwindles and we are left with a terrifying penultimate chapter depicting a woman going through a forced abortion-gone-wrong, to the last chapter which is written in the voice of Griffin herself, reminscent of a garden of Eden, beautiful poignant and full of hope in a quiet and powerful way.

You need to read it – it is breathtaking in its poetry, imagery and depth of feeling toward the suffering of women under the hands of men. I think after reading this book, my life can never be the same again. Every moment is now tainted with the knowledge of what women-folk have had to endure and although we all think the feminist movement is well and truly ‘finished’, after reading this book, I know that this is very, very far from the truth.

‘Women Who Run With The Wolves’ – by Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Food for the soul, stories from the heart, from the blood and bones of our ancestors, stories to teach and inspire us, really really inspire us, as women to move forward with our heads held high, our thighs braced for action and our bellies full of love for the world and our own beautiful selves.

Clarissa moves us through story after story, re-crafted from the most ancient sources, like archaeological digs from the past, before the time when stories were used for religious teachings or moral lessons used to tame a woman’s fire. She unearths slowly, story by story the Wild Woman archetype and reveals her beauty , strength and power to us through imagery of ugly ducklings, butterfly women, dancers, bones and vulnerable-girls-turned-wise.

Through her words we learn that whatever happens to a woman, however much she suffers, however much her fire is dampened, however she is scared, scarred and tormented, the Wild Woman fire can never be completely extinguished, there is always something that remains within us that can be rekindled, even ffgrom the smallest ember, the tiniest shard of bone. After reading ‘Wild’ and ‘Women and Nature’,  this is a perfect book to remedy all those ills within each and every one of us and in turn the earth.

One story Clarissa recounts is called Vasalisa The Wise, an archetypal tale of a daughter with cruel and unforgiving stepmother and daughters, who is sent out to her death in the woods. The innocent and lovely Vasalisa, who should perish out there in the wild, is saved by the doll in her pocket, given to her by her dying biological mother as a gift of insight and guidance. Through the help of the doll, who signifies our instinctual self, Vasalisa survives Baba Yaga’s house in the depths of the forest. In my diary I wrote whilst reading theis story, “I need to find Vasalisa’s doll for myself,” and then later I realised, as I finished the book, that the stories themselves are like bright jewels in my pocket, ready to be consulted like a wise doll at any time I need inspiration.

This is the gift that Clarissa brings in Women Who Run With The Wolves. The blood and bones of life, from ancestor to ancestor, mother to daughter; stories with everything we need to make a life of passion and strength, wisdom and solidity, creativity and lust for living that every women should have as a goddess-given right – and the therapy is in the decoding of the messages, the imagery within each tale, which, after a while becomes second nature as it spreads into our dreams and waking life.

‘The Druid Animal Oracle’ - by Philip Carr Gomm, Illustrated by Bill Worthington.

Sheer heaven in a box. The art is beautiful and the writing is wise and insightful. I use this deck almost every day, just to immerse myself in the imagery of nature and the wild. Many of the animals, native to Britain, I see outside my door every day: boar, deer, owl, hawk, salmon. Looking at these images and the messages they bring, gives me a deeper insight into my connection with the world around me.

I have from the youngest age been absolutely fascinated by wildlife, fauna and flora and feel a huge affinity with all the animals in this deck, along with the ancient Druid stories that accompany many of them. They bring me life and meaning and I feel deep inside the forest when I gaze across these images. I do not necessary use them for divination, but use them just to connect with the ancient forest daily and the archetypes that inhabit it. I am an Archer, my maiden name is Wood, so I feel at home in the lushness of these animal cards.

My children also love to look at these cards and arrange them in different configurations on the floor, we have taken to pulling out a card each in the morning and talking about the characteristics of the animal we draw, strength for a bull, timidity for a hare, cunning for a fox, a trickster the raven. I have a feeling that they connect to our wildish nature and the girls really become inspired by them, taking them into their every day lives, like I do, companions for the day, teaching them lessons from the wild.

‘The Druid Plant Oracle’ - by Philip Carr Gomm, Illustrated by Bill Worthington.

Similarly with the Plant Oracle, I enter a world of Druid imagery and plant personality. I feel the greenery of the ancient woods and glades, by the rivers and at the shores of Wild Britain and the plants talk to me there. I do not only use this divination cards for ailments and medicine, but for plant spirit healing, primrose for new beginnings and poppy for motherhood and remembrance. The imagery leads me into deeper and deeper meaning, a complex and connected web of healing and harmony. After all, plant spirits are available for our use for healing and inspiration.

These cards are constant companions and I use them for greater insight into the plants I find out in the field and forest by my house. They speak to me, giving me messages and like a therapy, I am able to go very deeply into their meaning and significance in a healing way. I feel like an ancient healer, moving around the hedgerows collecting herbs and simples for healing and nurturing.

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