Review by Jane Harries
This book contains the course used in the University of Massachusetts Medical Centre for stress management and reduction. The people using it, whose case histories are included in the text, have very pressing physical or emotional problems, including chronic pain and frightening illnesses. The course leader and author is himself a Buddhist, but he teaches meditation and ‘mindfulness’ in a secular context.
The course involves using meditation, relaxation and yoga for an 8-week period, during which no goals are set, in order to release people from striving to achieve a result, just as they might do in their everyday lives. I liked this attitude; an achievement orientation can be a curse for those recovering from ME, though motivation is important.
I used this course and book in my own way - following the relaxation and meditation practises but not the yoga or ‘walking’ meditation. I found that it was very helpful in reorienting myself to ‘being’ rather than ‘doing’, creating a feeling of more space in my life to appreciate things. The relaxation exercise was helpful in increasing my sleep at night and properly relaxing during the day, which felt healing. The 8 weeks was just a start for me - this is a life’s work!
In addition to the course exercises there is a lot of useful material here on all kinds of stress - ‘people stress’, ‘time and time stress’, ‘world stress’, ‘working with physical pain’, ‘working with panic, fear and anxiety’. These provide useful fuel for your mind at bad moments, and the case histories mentioned are very encouraging. I’d recommend this book for anyone who wants to improve the quality of their life, including their health.
This book is increasingly used in clinical settings, for instance it is used with with ME/CFS outpatients at the John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford as part of treatment, in conjunction with meditation sessions. >> ISBN 0385303122, available (plus more reviews) from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk.
Beautiful Work - A Meditation On Pain - Sharon CameronReview by Carole Bruce
If I could think in prose as spare and lyrically precise as Sharon Cameron in her book Beautiful Work, I would feel I was using all the symptoms of ME as a prolonged meditation. She is not ill herself but sets out to explore pain. During three Buddhist retreats she observes her bodily sensations minutely. As she does her awareness grows - subtly changing “my” pain into “the” pain.
It’s spare, modern American writing - almost a prose poem at times - her own experience is interspersed with the voices of three persons now dead - along with comments from the meditation master. She sets out to free herself of suffering through an incredibly detailed observation of storyless sensation. At the end of the book her purpose is revealed. Her heart is wide as she sits with patients suffering chronic terminal pain.
I keep this book beside my bed - dipping into a few paragraphs grounds me into a wider perspective and a reason to re-evaluate the endless struggle we all share. As Stephen Levine says, “It’s the key that fits the lock - this is the possibility of living without pain turning into suffering, of freeing the body to heal in the heart.” (Hardcover 121 pages). >> ISBN 082232508X, available (plus more reviews) from Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com.
Learning to Fall - Philip SimmonsReview by Margaret Irish
This is a delightful, wise little book of essays by an academic and writer diagnosed at 35 with MND who explores many of the topics that concern us greatly within this group. In each essay he reflects in a gentle, witty way on aspects of every-day life in rural New Hampshire and draws a spiritual thread from such things as visits to the dump and mating toads, mud, insects and winds in the forest. This could get a bit much: I occasionally groaned, envying his relentlessly positive view; but most of the time, his honest, kindly, down-to-earth approach kept me with him.
He calls on a wide range of traditions, with some fascinating discussions of familiar stories from the Bible and elsewhere and quotes many writers including TS Eliot and a certain still point, just for us! Always he tries to root any insights into how one can really live them while getting on with a difficult daily existence. His condition is touched on only lightly and in passing (a pity?) but it clearly drives the book, with the spiritual content becoming more insistent as time goes on, and there are moments of great sadness. That said, he remains surprisingly capable despite growing weakness and indeed has survived much longer than most. so perhaps he has got the right idea somewhere.
If I have any regrets about the book it would be his omission of the topic of care and carers, about which he could have written so well. In otherwise admirable books like this it seems to be taken as read that adequate and appropriate care is necessarily available while the principal carer (if there is one) experiences no great burden or loss. Here there are just a few clues in the acknowledgements but it does not detract from the rest of the text.
The book comes adorned with praise from many luminaries, such as Jack Kornfield describing it as "...an act of grace". I would warmly recommend it as a brave and heartening way to look for the "rewards of an imperfect life", as the book is subtitled. >> ISBN 055338158X, available (plus more reviews) from Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com.
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