Books are an amazing source of inspiration. Unfortunately, for a lot of us, reading a book isn’t as easy as it sounds. It’s the sitting and paying attention for long periods of time that gets us. That’s why I read three or four books at a time. This allows me to concentrate on one book for ten minutes or so, then I move on to the next. It’s a good system. You should try it.
If you decide to tell people about your illness, a lot of books will get thrown your way. Some come from curiosity, and others come from people who want to help. It can be sort of disgusting after a while. I say this because SO many people try to come up with shit that inspires the uninspired. A good portion of these "inspirations" come from quotes. Hallmark-ish kinda stupid, more often than not. But some of them are actually pretty great:
“We must embrace pain and burn it as fuel for our journey"
-- Kenji Miyazawa.
“Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap, but by the seeds you plant”
-- Robert Louis Stevenson.
“MTV is to music as KFC is to chicken”
-- Lewis Black.
I suspect that many of these quotes were written specifically for those with short attention spans. Just because I'm depressed doesn't mean I can't finish a book, asshole.
The best books are those that weren't written with any sort of mental illness in mind. Just pure energy and excitement. The kind of book that can lift ANYONE up. I recently found two books that have helped me quite a lot. They are both books about finding spirituality through music. ZEN GUITAR, by Philip Sudo, and THE MUSIC LESSON, by Victor Wooten. I must insist that you go out and buy them now.
THE MUSIC LESSON is geared more towards musicians, which is fine, but there are still things that relate to life, and can help in tough situations. In one section, the main character has a terrible headache. His teacher tries to explain why that headache should be met with gratitude… that it should be BLESSED, as it is an indicator of something that could be much worse. Find the root cause of the headache, and you can stop the problem before it gets worse. So it’s like, when we start to feel manic or depressed, or if we feel a panic attack coming on, we should THANK these feelings. We should BLESS them for showing up. Why? Because if we can FEEL it coming, we’ll know how to handle it… we’ll know what to do to prevent it. That is if we can identify what caused the episode in the first place. If we can do that, chances are, our “episode” won’t be as long, or as intense as it could have been.
ZEN GUITAR is really for anybody. No need to be a musician to get something out of this book. Almost every page of it is filled with quotable lines, and ways to improve your mind and spirit… ways to look at the world around you, and find your own personal peace. I’ll share with you one paragraph from the book that I find incredibly moving, and worth thinking about regularly:
“When we enter this world from the womb, all sensation is pure sensation. There are no words in our head. The voice of our mother, the light of the sun, the smell of the rain - all of it is one great sensation, flowing in a continuous stream. We see sound, we hear feelings, we taste light, because it is all the same. The moment we begin distinguishing sight from sound from smell, separating things, naming and categorizing them, we begin the rational process that leads us away from experiencing true oneness.”
Isn’t that beautiful? “Oneness” is what we all strive for, isn’t it? Oneness with God, or Spirit, or some cosmic energy without a form or a name; Oneness with those around us. Especially those of us who desperately need a strong support system just to get through half the day. So, if we start to think of EVERYTHING as the SAME thing, perhaps we won’t feel like garbage all the time. It doesn't have to be right or wrong. You don’t have to believe it or trust it. It’s just there to make you think… to get your mind on an even keel. By reading those words, and giving them serious thought, you may have had a wonderful experience. Now, it may not have lasted very long, but that’s not the point. The point is, the moments it took to have that wonderful experience COULD have been terrible moments. A moment like this shouldn’t be difficult to BLESS at all.
*originally written on Peeling Back The Layers"*
