The Library that I Leaned On – An Autobiographical Appreciation of Books that Facilitated My Overcoming of Ulcerative Colitis
Le Lecteur (Reader), Honore Daumier
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. (It goes without saying, I am not a doctor and everyone should do their own research and consult with a physician when in doubt regarding medicine, supplements and therapies.)
Spontaneous Healing and Health and Healing: The Philosophy of Integrative Medicine and Optimum Health - Dr. Andrew Weil, M.D.
As I mentioned in my previous blog post, when I was first diagnosed with ulcerative colitis in 2002, my specialist was a socially inept individual with a callous regard for me as a patient. Initially, I consulted with people in health food stores about diet and supplements. When the colitis returned in 2003, I turned to Dr. Andrew Weil’s helpful and insightful books on healing. (The only caveat is that he recommended making a paste out of slippery elm. Doing this, I believed, caused the eventual blockage in my intestine and further distressed my healing.)
“Acceptance of illness is often part of a larger acceptance of self that represents a significant mental shift, a shift that can initiate transformation of personality and with it the healing of disease. ”
The Future of Healing: Exploring the Parallels of Eastern and Western – Michel P. Milburn, Ph.D.
I have spoken about the impact of Milburn’s book in my podcast (check out: Discovering the Abdominal Brain - Traditional Chinese Medicine to further one’s healing). However, to summarize, this book along with Spontaneous Healing provided some idea about how one can use the mind to heal the body.
“In the West, the mind is associated with the nervous system, particularly the brain. In the East, the brain is a ‘curious’ organ, associated with the kidney organ-meridian system. The ‘energetic’ center in the abdomen is the center of both body and mind, and elements of mind are distributed through the body.”
Eat Right 4 Your Type – The Individualized Blood Type Diet – Dr. Peter J. D’Adamo
In 2003, following my ‘stay’ (it felt more like an ‘incarceration’ or ‘two weeks of torture’) at McMaster University Hospital, I emerged more broken than when I entered. While getting Reiki work done in April, my therapist advised me to follow the dietary guidelines from D’Adamo’s book.
While I advise people to consider the emotional components of a chronic illness, at times, it goes without saying we need to provide our body the proper nourishment. Renata, my therapist, said quite rightly: your body is weak, and it would be advisable to adhere to a diet that is more in line with your needs. For this reason, I feel this book needs to be mentioned. We all require all the help we can get.
Past Lives, Future Healing – Sylvia Browne
I recognize that the idea of past lives having an impact on our current existence, especially our health, may be regarded far-fetched in our secular society. Browne’s book was preaching to the choir when I read it in May 2003, following my miraculous past life regression therapy. Whether you believe in a previous existence or not, this is something that can awaken possibilities. I strongly urge sufferers to consider hypnotherapy to unlock the power of the mind and to relieve both pain and trauma. If it is any consolation, why not regard the previous existence as your body’s way of creating an internal theatre or arena of catharsis.
“Please don’t let the term ‘past lives’ mislead you into thinking you’ve arrived this time around as a separate person from who you’ve been before, alive, then, dead, then alive again. No, what you’re living right now is simply the current phase of one life, the same eternal life your spirit has been living and will go on living forever. ”
Love, Medicine and Miracles: Lessons Learned about Self-Healing from a Surgeon’s Experience with Exceptional Patients – Bernie Siegel, M.D.
In the summer of 2003, I happened miraculously upon this book. Even with my experience at McMaster months behind me, the trauma lingered.
Siegel is certainly the ideal doctor. His emphasis on love in the healing process cannot be discounted, and yet it is often the case in hospitals and clinics. The scientific brain is certainly a boon to our culture; however, a mathematical and theoretical approach to human beings when an individual is living through a time of absolute distress could be considered cold and callous. Sometimes I think doctors must lose their humanity in order to survive med school, and that by reducing their patients to symptoms is their defence mechanism. It doesn’t benefit the suffering patient to be looked upon with such indifferent eyes.
I finished this book teary-eyed, longing to have had the support and wisdom of someone like Siegel at my most vulnerable hours. We all deserve better than our current medical system. (Also check out The Morning Miracle podcast episode with Bernie Siegel.)
“There are no incurable diseases, only incurable people”
Paradox and Healing: Medicine, Mythology and Transformation – Michael Greenwood, M.B. and Peter Nunn, M.B.
While living in Victoria, B.C. in one of the hardest and most challenging years of my life, my mother lent me this book. In February 2004, it was a kind of serendipity-synchronicity because reading through this tome I found it interesting that I myself was based in the very city these authors were working in. Moreover, their ideas about healing, looking towards the emotional and the irrational, the paradoxical nature of overcoming illness have become a foundation for my approach to illness and have contributed a great deal to my philosophy.
This is not a conventional self-help book, nor is this a conventional book on medicine. These two doctors represent the physicians of the future, one where medicine marries the lessons learned from mythology and philosophy. Every page radiates with wisdom and compassion, the latter another attribute of the doctor of the future will hopefully have.
The book truly altered my perspective on illness and motivated me to stop seeking cures in herbal remedies or relying on punitive diets. This book helped make me become honest about my distance to my emotional and hurting self.
Famed Romanian historian of religions, Mircea Eliade in his youth, 1933
Shamanism - Mircea Eliade; The Spirit of Shamanism - Roger N. Walsh; and The Shaman’s Body – Arnold Mindell
In the spring and summer of 2004, still living in Victoria, I was occupying a basement bedroom suite at a quasi-guru’s house. I had been involved in a meditation group that could have been a cult. Who is to say?
Glen, one of the members at the Chi House, was a fellow sufferer of irritable bowel, though further on his path in terms of healing in comparison to me. A former government employee, Glen had managed to change his life by getting involved in healing retreats and shamanism.
I recommend these three books. Eliade’s analysis is more academic, while Walsh and Mindell offer approachable interpretations. The main concept of shamanism is that when the soul is lost, whether due to a struggle with identity, grief, or trauma, despair and depression inevitably invade the human body. This occupation results in illness. We cannot underestimate the importance of positive attitudes, psychological healing when dealing with disease.
“The primitive magician, the medicine man or shaman is not only a sick man, he is above all, a sick man who has been cured, who has succeeded in curing himself.”
The Anatomy of the Spirit and Why People Don’t Heal and How They Can – Caroline Myss
For much of 2005, I threw myself into hypnotherapy. This avenue exhausted by 2006, I turned to counseling. Myss’s books were relevant and immensely helpful and similar to the books on shamanism, as her material follows similar ideas.
One might try to dismiss her as simply New Age - I would disagree with such an assessment. I strongly urge people to pick up her books with their no-nonsense approach. Myss’s philosophy about emotional wounds (here called ‘woundology’) left an impact on me. She remarked in one of her talks that a wound is like this part of ourselves that absorbs all our energy. We give power to the wound and take away the power from our body and being. The wound becomes this entity and only when we stop nourishing it, can we be free.
In my case, the wound derived from the pain in my relationships with my brother and father. By learning to relieve the wound, the energy in our bodies can flow naturally. (One might investigate lectures she has given. A YouTube search will yield results.)
“What drains your spirit drains your body. What fuels your spirit fuels your body.”
Eastern Body and Western Mind: Psychology and the Chakra System as a Path to the Self – Anodea Judith
This book might not be for everybody, but in 2006, I needed a balance between my readings on Jungian psychology and Eastern mysticism. I adhere to the chakra system, that is, we have seven main energy centers. For sufferings of irritable bowel diseases, the lower three chakras are in a state of depletion and distress. Anodea outlines certain traumas and abuses that may have occurred in a person’s life and how to heal. Her recommendations were extremely helpful, from the practical (getting massages to further facilitate a connection with one’s body) to the insightful.
Absent Fathers, Lost Sons: The Search for Masculine Identity – Guy Corneau; Fire in the Belly – Sam Keen; He: Understanding Masculine Psychology – Robert A. Johnson
From 2003 onward, I continually found myself relating to the legend of Percival in the stories surrounding Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Percival means ‘pure fool’ but his story of being raised by a mother, not knowing his father resonated with me.
The Arming and Departure of the Knights, 1891-1894, one of a series of tapestries painted by English Pre-Raphaelite painters, Edward Burne-Jones, William Morris and John Henry - our standard depiction of masculinity as the knight protecting the damsel.
My father is alive and well, however, our relationship has been one of tests and trials. As a child, my formidable years, my dad was never quite present for me. He existed in this periphery, a blue collar millwright prone to workaholic hours and as such, I have few childhood memories of moments with him.
In my teens, in the wake of my parents’ separation, with no real grounding in a proper father-son relationship, I ‘foolishly’ resorted to the role of a listener as he raved about and bemoaned women, siting betrayal and cruelty in the female sex. In order to be closer to my father, I inadvertently became his therapist. Burying my own frustrations and anger, I wanted to be my dad’s confidant, and this stunted my emotional development.
Learning about masculinity in 2007 and 2008, about the difficulties of manhood, the expectations, the vulnerabilities, the cultural pressures, these three books helped me feel a sense of community with other men and gradually, I began to build stronger bridges with my peers as well as recognize my own faults and flaws.
A further note: Guy Corneau himself experienced ulcerative colitis. Like me, he too grew up in Canada under a father with a blue collar work ethic and mindset. I am entirely grateful for his book, seeing myself in his mirror. Unfortunately, I will not be able to thank him one day, as he passed away from cancer in 2017 at the age of 65. A terrible loss.
“There are two questions a man must ask himself: The first is ‘Where am I going?’ and the second is ‘Who will go with me?’ If you ever get these questions in the wrong order you are in trouble”
Ambiguous Loss: Learning to Live with Unresolved Grief – Pauline Boss
From 2009 t0 2014, I was no longer living in British Columbia, but rather Ontario. However, my rolling stone disposition persisted I went from living with my brother to finding a place on my own in my hometown of St. Catharines, to house sitting for my mother and step-father in Kingsville, a quaint, sleepy burg forty minutes from the Detroit-Windsor border.
While this time led to further reconciliations with my father – in 2012 and 2013 we had remarkable breakthroughs in our relationship where I was able to speak my truth – my brother and I were never able to address issues or discuss grievances. My father, though stubborn, resistant to discussing difficult subjects, was at least open on certain occasions to hearing out what I had to say. When we argued, I sensed that he secretly enjoyed the back and forth. With him, I could admit my imperfections and he, the same.
My brother, Mark, on the other hand never allowed me to reproach him. While he flew the banner of ‘Family First’, he turned his back on those he shared blood with in favour of friends. Whenever I tried to open up, express myself, he cut me off, said I was immature for wanting to dredge up the past or address an issue he deemed irrelevant.
In 2014, I decided not to attend his wedding. There is a history here I will explore, whether in a future podcast or blog, but I can safely say, it was one of the best decisions I have ever made. But even with our current estrangement, now 8 years in the making, I went through internal grief.
While in Leipzig, reading Boss’s book helped me through that time far from home. Sometimes we must mourn people because we can no longer reach out to them. It is not a physical loss, a more psychological and emotional one. Old symptoms returned in 2016, during Christmas, when old memories returned of my lost brotherhood.
“En réalité, chaque lecteur est, quand il lit, le propre lecteur de soi-même. L’ouvrage d’un écrivain n’est qu’une espèce d’instrument optique qu’il offre au lecteur afin de lui permettre de discerner ce que sans le livre il n’eût peut-être pas vu en soi-même. (In reality every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have perceived in himself.)”