For some time, I have considered posting a blog with a reading recommendation list. The list alone, I have figured, would not be sufficient. As such, I’ve since decided to offer a biographical reading list, explaining where I was at the time of reading the following books and why I found them important and impactful in my journey of overcoming

With the right questions, by going inside, by examining the self, the soul, going into the library of the psyche, investigating past traumas, whether in the here and now or another existence, whatever the case, I have found that the impact and utility of a good question can work wonders. It provides a greater service than all the drugs and all the diets in the world.

How do we survive? We survive because of God’s grace, the grace of invisible angels and miraculous helpers, and of course, the momentary boosts of energy that waft our way mysteriously. When I think of the past year, unemployed, looking for work, finishing a novel I had been struggling to complete, I know it could have been worse. I consider the life of the Russian writer, Pavel Petrovich Bazhov (1879-1950)

From a place of retrospect, it makes sense that she was so curt in her response. With over fifteen thousand subscribers to her channel, each video getting three thousand plus views, why would she change her channel’s format? Suffering was the secret to her success. When you’re not sick, how can you have the attention? Where is your identity now? Healing would mean shooting the goose laying the golden egg.

While I definitely adhere to the concept of cell memory, others may have trouble with the radical and unconventional idea. There are many who want to heal but perhaps feel this unorthodox, off-the-beaten-path approach far too wild to even consider going down.

On the one level, the Count is an antagonist, a ruling party pooper. Yet he is more than comic fodder. Mozart knew this. We feel pathos for the short-sided man. This character blindly spends the entire opera in this mire of anger and longing, conspiring to pain and manipulate, to wrongfully seduce another man’s wife. He has no regard for his actions, no awareness of what his intentions might entail; from a limited perception based upon his own righteous self-justification, he is attempting to undermine the order and happiness of the day. Towards the end of the opera, the veil begins to life for the Count, and he soon has eyes to see.

From an early age growing up in Canada, I was exposed not only to English but to French (through school) and also to Dutch (through my father’s family). Words, then as much as now, have filled me with wonder and that wonder contributed to my yearning to solve mysteries; namely one of the sources of the ulcerative colitis.

…with my Opa. After all my research, I finally understood that my body back in March 1997 was expressing a latent grief. I thought of a friend’s sister. Jess had got the Crohn’s disease following her grandmother’s hit-and-run accident. The raging sorrow. My gut back then at the age of 17 was crying. It was doing the weeping for me.