About the book
An engaging tale of a woman who was taken to concentration camp at Auschwitz at a tender age of 16. A year and a half filled with riotous and unfathomable upheavals. Followed by grueling trials and trepidations spanning over decades, finally leading to healing and recovery.
Edith Eger, her story doesn’t end with that frightful and horrific period at the concentration camp. Life throws a miscellany of challenges her way, post liberation too. After a year and a half of sufferings and hardships in the camp, she is eventually rescued amidst the death march, from a heap of dead bodies by an American soldier and that is just the beginning of the snail paced recovery to normalcy that she trundles towards for more than 30 years after. Eventually, she goes on to become one of the most renowned psychologists in America known for working with Army veterans.
It is a story of hope and resilience. Some may not feel like reading a gory and grisly account of a concentration camp. But you know why must you pace yourself through this blog and eventually the book - because “even in hell, hope can flower”. And so says the tag line of the book.
Who is it for
Anyone who needs encouragement to pace through life, accept life and the courage to move on.
Key takeaways
The litany of lessons in this book are something that we have all heard of before but when you associate a raw and real tale with those lessons, it just feels more doable. It is encouragement in its purest form:
Life: Even the dullest moments of our lives are opportunities to experience hope, buoyancy, happiness. Mundane life is life too. As is painful life and stressful life.
A thought provoking question that we all need to answer for ourselves is “Why do we so often struggle to feel alive, or distance ourselves from feeling life fully? Why is it such a challenge to bring life to life?”
Common disease: The most common disease amongst people of today is HUNGER. We are all hungry. Hungry for approval, attention, affection. We are hungry for the freedom to embrace life.
Unfortunately, the freedom lies within us because the limitations stem from our minds. We need to free ourselves from the shackles of perception.
Suffering is universal. But victimhood is optional. There is a difference victimization and victimhood. We are all likely to be victimized in some way in the course of our lives. At some point we will suffer some kind of a calamity or abuse, caused by circumstances or people or institutions over which we have little or no control. This is life and this is victimization - it comes from the outside. In contrast victimhood comes from the inside. No one can make you a victim but you. We become a victim not because of what happens to us but when we choose to hold on to our victimization. We develop a victim‘s mind by being rigid, pessimistic, stuck in the past, unforgiving, punitive, by blaming and by our inability to maintain healthy limits of boundaries. We become our own jailors when we choose the confines of the victim’s mind.
There is no comparative chart for your pain versus mine: There is no hierarchy of suffering. There is nothing that makes my pain or suffering worse or better than yours, no graph on which we can plot the relative importance of one sorrow versus another. There is no comparison that can lead to minimize or diminish one’s suffering. Being a survivor, being a thriver requires absolute acceptance of what was and what is. If we discount our pain, or ourselves for feeling lost or isolated or scared about challenges in our lives, however insignificant these challenges may seem to someone else, then we are still choosing to be victims.
Be consciously aware of your mind:
A. The little upsets in our lives are emblematic of the larger losses, the seemingly insignificant worries are representative of greater pain.
B. Nobody can take away what you have put in your mind.
C. Limitations that need to be transcended aren’t without - they are within.
The choice is always yours:
A. We always have a choice to pay attention to what we have lost or to pay attention to what we still have.
B. Everything can be taken from a man but one thing - the last of the human freedom - to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way. Each moment is a choice. No matter how frustrating or pure or constraining or painful or oppressive an experience maybe, we can always choose how we respond.
C. To be free i.e. to live in the present. If you are stuck in the past or we spend our time in the future, we are not free. The only place where we can exercise our freedom of choice is in the present.
Prison of the past: How easily the life we didn’t live becomes the only life we praise. How easily we can claim to worship the choices we think we could or should have made.
Grieve for what happened and for what didn’t happen but after that give up the need for a different past. Accept life as it was and as it is. The past doesn’t teach the present, the present doesn’t diminish the past. Time is the medium. Time is the track, we travel it.
Revenge is useless: It can’t alter what was done to us, it can’t erase the wrong we suffered, it can’t bring back the dead. At worst, revenge perpetuates the cycle of hate. Keeps the hate circling on and on. When we seek revenge, even non-violent revenge, we are revolving, not evolving.
Future: Future is the sum of an equation that is part intention and part circumstance. And the intentions could shift. Or split.
How to change our behavior: Underlying are most harmful behaviors is a philosophy or ideological core that is irrational yet so central to our views of ourselves and the world that often we are not aware that it is only a belief. We are not even aware of how persistently we repeat this belief to ourselves in our daily lives. These beliefs determine our feelings of sadness, anger, anxiety etc. and our feelings in turn influence our behavior. To change our behavior, we must change our feelings and to change our feelings we must change our thoughts.
We will have unpleasant experiences in our lives, we will make mistakes, we won’t always get what we want. This is part of being human. The problem and the foundation of a persistent suffering is the belief that discomfort, mistakes, disappointment signals something about us. The belief that the unpleasant things in our lives are all we deserve.
Perfectionism: It is the belief that something is broken - you. So you dress up your brokenness with degrees, achievements, accolades, pieces of paper, none of which can fix what you think you’re fixing.
Release and let go: Suppressing the feelings only makes it harder to let them go. Expression is the opposite of depression. Release begins with acceptance. To heal, we embrace the dark. We walk through the shadow of the valley on our way to the light. Maybe to heal isn’t to erase the scar, or even to make the scar. To heal is to cherish the wound. Our painful experiences aren’t a liability - they are a gift. They give us perspective and meaning, an opportunity to find our unique purpose and our strengths. There is no one size fits all template for healing, but there are steps that can be learnt and practiced, steps that each individual use to make his or her own way, steps in the dance of freedom. Time does not heal. It’s what you do with the time. Healing is possible when we choose to take responsibility, when we choose to take risks, and finally when we choose to release the hurt, let go of the past.
Mourning: Mourning is important. But when it goes on and on it can be a way of avoiding grief. Mourning rites and rituals can be an extremely important component of grief work. That’s why religious and cultural practices include clear mourning rituals. These allow one to begin to experience the feelings of loss. But the mourning period also has a clear end. From that point on, the loss isn’t a separate dimension of life - the loss is integrated into life. If you stay in a state of perpetual mourning, choosing a victim’s mentality, believing that you will never get over it. If you say stuck in mourning it is as though our lives are over too.
Fight, or flee or flow: Sometimes we need to flow because fighting and fleeing aren’t the options available to us.
This book redefines the meaning of hope, gratitude, perseverance and the freedom of choice. No one consciously chooses to live in captivity. Yet more often than not, we willingly handover our spiritual and mental freedom, to others.
My thoughts
It is time for reflection.
A time to redirect and reset what we CHOOSE to become.
Whether we choose to become victims of our past and imprison ourselves within the shackles of perception, social conditioning, cultural archetypes or we choose to free ourselves and embrace this gift of life with love, hope and gratitude.
We are all in the process of “becoming” and will forever be. This process doesn’t end at 13, 30, 60 or 90. This process is merely life in progression. The choice is only to consciously try to become something. Either way, you will constantly evolve in one direction or another and become one thing or another. The choice for you is to consciously be or not to be.