Jacob Holistic Healing

Recommended Reading

I am a voracious reader and you can look forward to reviews of some of my favorite books being added to this page regularly.

Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow by Elizabeth Lesser
“How strange it is that the nature of life is change, yet the nature of human beings is to resist change.” Thus begins Lesser’s in-depth exploration of the impact of difficult life transitions. She uses her own experiences of divorce, woven together with the experiences of others to bring light into the darkness of loss and tragedy. As a professional leader of self-development workshops, Lesser builds a case for the need to “stay awake” to the process of transformation, allowing oneself to feel all the feelings, to learn all of the lessons, to dig deep and ask questions pf ones soul. She has witnessed the common response of avoiding or repressing pain, but argues that light can only be found when one allows darkness. Much of her thought comes from the Buddhist tenant of non-attachment and the belief that resistance to change can be a greater source of pain than the change itself. “Making the choice, over and over again, to accept what is, and to release what was, has become the major focusing agent for my spiritual work.” Some changes require that one give up all of what they thought their lives would be. Lesser says that while this may be sad, it need not be depressing.
One of Lesser’s major concepts is the Phoenix Process, “named for the mythical phoenix bird who remains awake through the fires of change, rises from the ashes of death, and is reborn into his most vibrant and enlightened self.” While resisting or going to sleep may seem easier or less painful, staying awake and allowing oneself to be broken open leads to extraordinary opportunities for growth and transformation.
Lesser’s book could be valuable for anyone facing illness, loss of a loved one, or some other life challenge. Her honesty, scholarship, and vast personal and professional experience provide the reader with guidance for moving through a challenge and coming out in a better place on the other side.

In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto by Michael Pollan

Michael Pollan, author of several books about science and food promises to cut through the confusion and conflicts about healthy eating to identify a few simple rules to guide food choices. He wants his readers to reclaim the pleasure of eating while also regaining their health. Pollan uses government documents, scientific reports, and discussions with experts to make sense of our current issues and derive his rules for healthy and delicious eating.
Pollan discusses the pitfalls of the typical Western diet, which includes too much salt, sugar, damaging fats, and chemicals; and too little whole food and variety. While we seem to be increasingly anxious and confused about eating we are gaining pounds and experiencing an epidemic of diabetes. He searches for the answers as to how we got to this point, and finds the culprits in an ideology he calls nutritionism, along with a growing industrialization of food, the challenges in conducting and reporting nutrition research, and the desire of consumers for convenient, cheap food.
The underlying problem in the Western diet is the replacement of real food with highly processed food like substances. Forces driving this problem include “nutritionism,” defined as the “widely shared but unexamined assumption that the key to understanding food is the nutrient.” This ideology, as he explains, reduces food to its most basic units and labels each component as good or bad. Food becomes a mechanism for delivering certain nutrients rather than a complex source of multiple factors, some of which we may not even understand. Nutritionism is responsible for such things as margarine, egg substitutes, non-fat cookies and salad dressings, soy isolates, and numerous other concoctions brought to the market by the food industry where products and profits are based on processing whole foods from plants and animals into some sort of products.
Nutrition science conforms to this nutritionist ideology and is inherently weak due to the challenges in gathering data on human nutrition. Pollan cites as an example the overwhelming acceptance of the lipid hypothesis whereby cholesterol is blamed for heart disease. All fat was labeled as unhealthy and in the rush to avoid fat diets became filled with simple carbohydrates or sugar. As Pollan points out, we have since learned that not all fat is created equal, that avoiding fat made us fatter, and that the evidence linking dietary cholesterol is increasingly weak.
As promised, Pollan leads up to a set of rules of thumb, which he derived from his studies. Each recommendation is expounded upon and supported at length. While many of them are obvious (eat meals, eat slowly, do all of your eating at a table), a few worth mentioning are:
Don’t eat anything your great grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food
Get out of the supermarket whenever possible.
Eat mostly plants, especially leaves.
Pay more, eat less.
Do all your eating at a table.
Don’t get your fuel from the same place your car does.
Cook and, if you can, plant a garden.
Pollan’s thesis is found in the first three lines of the book: eat food, not too much, mostly plants. The rest of the book does an excellent job of explaining why these three simple statements are profoundly true.

The Biology of Belief: Unleashing the power of consciousness, matter, and miracles

Bruce Lipton, PhD

Mountain of Love/Elite Books, 2005 

Bruce Lipton is a conventionally trained cellular biologist who began, in the 1970s, to question biology’s Central Dogma; that genes control life.  In this book he carefully explains his awakening to the understanding that environment is the key to triggering gene activity, and that we are gifted with multiple options for impacting this all important environment.  Lipton argues, very convincingly, that the current scientific focus on genetic answers to disease needs to be scrapped, especially in light of the findings of the Human Genome project that there are simply not enough genes to account for the complexity of human life or human disease.

In a chapter entitled The Magical Membrane, he points out that cells have receptors that act like antennae which can read energy fields.  This evidence challenges the “old biology” notion that only physical or chemical molecules can impact physiology.

One section of particular interest to energy healers describes the principle of harmonic resonance.  Energy waves can be understood to either combine in power (constructive interference) or cancel each other out (destructive interference.)  Knowing  that vibrational frequencies can alter the physical and chemical properties of cells provides scientific support for energy therapies intended to create harmonic resonance.   In fact, Lipton points out that energy is a more efficient means of affecting matter than chemicals, suggesting that energy therapy is more “in tune” with our beings that pharmaceutical remedies.  

Lipton then goes on to discuss how thoughts can impact ones energy vibration, and thus cellular function, physiology, and overall state of well being.  Thoughts are the mind’s energy, and they directly influence how the physical brain affects the body’s physiology.  Thoughts can activate or inhibit cell function through the mechanics of constructive and destructive interference.  Thus, it is important for our health and well-being to shift our mind’s energy toward positive, life-generating thoughts.  Taking this one step further, our perceptions and beliefs, no matter how closely they reflect reality, have a profound impact on our health,  Many of the perceptions and beliefs that control our habitual thinking and automatic responses are seated in our subconscious mind, and as a practicing hypnotherapist I know that hypnosis is uniquely effective in helping individuals recognize harmful negative programming and replace it with positive and life-affirming beliefs.

Lipton expands his theory about improving individual well being through the internal environment to encompass the well being of all of Gaia, the earth and all if its communities.  He ends the book by calling for the elimination of “survival of the fittest” thinking, declaring that “survival of the most loving is the only thinking that will ensure not only a healthy personal life but also a healthy planet.”

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle:  A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver 

This wonderful author has a new book which chronicles the year that she and her family spent eating only locally grown or raised food, most of which they produced themselves.  The book begins with their move from Tuscon, AZ  to a farm in rural Appalachia.  They then faced the tough decision about when to begin their experiment, knowing that few fruits and vegetables are available during many  months of the year.  Beginning in the spring, they ate a great deal of chard and lettuce until summer vegetables began to grow.  They allowed themselves only a few items that were not available locally, namely coffee, olive oil, and wheat flour.

This book reads like a combination of poetry, science, and high adventure.  Kingsolver takes the reader along as she faces the hilarity involved in the reproductive lives of turkeys, and you can just feel her heavy sighs as she looks out over her kitchen where every surface is piled high with tomatoes that must somehow be preserved.

For me,  the book was a real eye-opener. I find myself more and more interested in where my food comes from and how far it has traveled.  I am increasingly interested in searching out sources of local foods which are fresh, seasonal, and haven’t required massive amounts of fuel for transportation.  Yet, I am passionate about grapefruit which I buy knowing that it always has to be transported to Michigan from somewhere far away.

I do believe that Kingsolver is on to something.  Transporting food great distances consumes tremendous amounts of fuel, not to mention the nutritional impact of picking produce well before it has ripened.  Bottled water alone is one of the most egregious contributors to environmental degradation.  For every one million bottles shipped 18.2 tons of carbon dioxide are dumped into our air.

For now, I plan to purchase more of my food from farmer’s markets where I know I will find local products, and I’m already scouting sunny areas of my yard so that I can build a vegetable garden next spring.  Another option you may want to consider is to join a Community Supported Agriculture farm which will deliver boxes of organic produce to members for 20 weeks each year.  Maple Creek Farm in Yale, MI delivers to various sites in metro-Detroit.  (www.maplecreekfarm.com, 810-387-4365). 

I highly recommend this wonderful book and I’m confident that all who read it will find themselves changed in some small but positive ways.  And small steps taken by many can lead to great change.