I fell in love with books as a young girl, when my sisters and I read every Nancy Drew book we could get our hands on. Creative fiction opened up entire worlds to me, both real and imaginary.
As I got older, Jane Austen’s novels introduced me to English country life and I fell in love all over again. C.S. Lewis’ adventures in Narnia and J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series kept me coming back for more.
Today, I tend to spend most of my reading time with non-fiction. My pursuit of conscious parenting leads me to the self-help, spirituality and parenting shelves at the bookstore.
With the occasional drive-by trashy novel, just for fun.
I have learned, for the most part, that if a book is not capturing my imagination, or firing my spirit, it is okay to set it aside. Not all books are meant to be finished.
Others books, I return to again and again.
And with a very few, I experience a long-term, life-changing transformation.
There are probably dozens, but for now, here are 5 Books That Changed My Life.
1. Cheaper By the Dozen, by Ernestine Gilbreth and Frank B. Gilbreth, Jr. Bearing almost no resemblance to the contemporary films of the same title, this book tells the true story of pioneering motion study experts Frank and Lillian Gilbreth and their family of twelve children. It is funny, heartwarming and at times bittersweet.
Frequently hilarious accounts of how the Gilbreths used their managerial efficiency practices to bring order to their huge household are sheer genius. The story of how they were all taught to lather themselves up in the bathtub – up one arm and down the other – is worth the read all by itself.
Someday, my children will read this and understand why I am the way I am.
2. Creative Visualization, by Shakti Gawain. Perhaps the first book in the mind-body-spirit genre that really stuck with me, this classic delivered my unifying theory of the Universe. It was here that I began to learn about affirmations, meditation, visualization and my own powers of conscious creation.
Almost everything that has come since – every book I have read and every practice I have adopted – has been framed by the ideas I welcomed into my worldview, after reading this book.
3. You Can Heal Your Life, by Louise Hay. I have written about this book numerous times already. I have given it as gifts and recommend it unequivocally.
If you are one of the millions (billions?) of people on this planet struggling to accept and love yourself in all your glorious human frailty, this is the book for you. It is a simple, easy read; the impact it will have on you – if you let it – will be profound.
4. Connection Parenting, by Pam Leo. Here is another book that I have written about multiple times. Quite simply, it turned my ideas about parenting upside down.
While I am a reasonably successful (I like to think) product of the command-and-control parenting style, I have found that it just doesn’t work the same way with my children. I used to think, “I never would have reacted like that, as a child. What am I doing wrong?”
This book showed me what I knew intuitively: That children are human beings, just like adults, who react to the same positive and negative inputs. It gave me a new set of parenting tools and made me, if not a better parent (yet), at least a more hopeful one.
5. Recapture Your Health, by Walt Stoll and Jan DeCourtney. Okay, I am going to cheat just a bit here and list this one side-by-side with The Body Ecology Diet, by Donna Gates. Both books helped me find my way to a whole-foods diet that healed my stressed out digestive track, helped me lose thirty pounds and led me to adopt healthy eating habits to last a lifetime.
Recapture Your Health is a bit more simplistic, and for me at least, an easier place to start. Once you get that under your belt (no pun intended), The Body Ecology Diet will give you more in-depth information and fill in several important gaps.
Think about the books that have been important to you, both as a child and as a parent. Are some of them stories you want to share with your children?
What a wonderful exercise in conscious parenting!
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As a single mother raising two sons, developing lifelong readers can be a bit of a challenge. If you find yourself in a similar situation, please enjoy: Teaching Our Sons to Love Reading, and All Things Stinky and Gross: More on the Joys of Reading with Boys.
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