☘Misericordia☘ ⚡ϟ⚡⛈⚡☁ ❇️❤❣'s Reviews > May Cause Side Effects: A Memoir

What a wonderful book. I can't recommend it enough!

I cannot begin to say how much I loved this one. It's one of those rare psychology memoirs that didn't feel like a rant on the topic 'parents did it to me'. While parents do a lot of stuff both for and to us, it's rarely up to just their frivolous decisions how we turn out. Anyway, no matter how we grow up we'll have stuff to scare our psychologist into going to theirs. LOL!

A great read. A lot of cooking. An interesting take on prescriptions and on 'Eat, pray, love' (or maybe 'cook, love, travel?')

Q:
I drop my head back onto the floor, close my eyes, and think of my mother. She always said it’s like she was born with the curtain half open, like the barrier between the perceived human experience and the soul’s purpose never quite closed. From the time she was little, she says, she could “see” beyond the three-dimensional world in front of her and tap into a level of existence that seems to elude most everyone else. Over the years, this gift has led her to understand the world through a distinct ethereal lens, one that goes beyond the constraints of religious doctrine and constitutional law. (c)
Q:
It goes something like this: It is all a game. An eternal game played by eternal beings; a universal Easter egg hunt of sorts, with players who incarnate as humans into this world, again and again, embodying a particular play piece each time. Round and round we go, born into families and cultures telling us the game we’re playing is about money and power and fame, separation and segregation and dark versus light. But really, the whole point of the game is to figure out it’s a game—a game about discovering we are all one, each of us a spark of the same source. (c)
Q:
Clues appear like hidden eggs, my mother says. Little eggs of light that show up through everything from compassion to art to nature to heroic acts. Reminders of our true identity. Think Buddhism without the whole “life is suffering” bit + Christianity without heaven and hell + a good dose of The Matrix thrown in. But since this is the most difficult game ever created, we begin each hunt blind, deaf, and dumb. Extraordinarily dumb. So dumb we don’t even remember we’re playing a game, or that there are even any eggs to be found. We rig the game from the start with whatever economic, racial, physical, political, and familial bullshit exists in the sliver of the world we choose for ourselves. We think suffering in a Mombasa slum is different from suffering in a Manhattan high-rise, but pain is pain is pain. We all spend most of our lives just trying to avoid the suffering, occasionally tripping over an egg in our most untethered moments. Still, we often don’t realize what we’ve found until we trip over it a few times. And even then we’re not sure, because we start to wonder if there are better eggs around. (c)
Q:
When we inevitably don’t figure out the game at the end of our life—no matter, there’s another round right behind it. And another and another and another. As many as it takes. Maybe it’s a new scenario, or maybe it’s one we’ve done 1,000 times before. We get to choose, since we have to experience them all in order to understand we are of the same source, just wrapped in different skin.
Besides, we can only win the game together. Only when every last one of us learns to see through the illusion of difference and embodies unconditional love will we all move forward in peace. But this unconditional love cannot exist without all that is ugly and threatening in the world. Because how can we learn unconditional love if we have never felt hatred, disgust, and resentment? (c)
Q:
“I believe our souls live outside of physical reality, and that the soul knows what is best and perfect for us. Imagine that our fully enlightened soul projects its light through us, like our mind and body is a camera lens. The light goes through the lens and projects a picture of everything that is good or bad in our lives—our job, our health, our relationships. If we don’t like the picture, it’s because our soul is trying to shine its light through a cracked lens. Instead of getting the things that bring us joy, we get sadness or despair or frustration or anger.” (c)
Q:
Here was a woman who, after being widowed at forty-seven, survived breast cancer, underwent open-heart surgery, kept a business afloat with forty employees during the recession, and did it all while raising an only child with suicidal tendencies. And yet she never succumbed to rage, never lost that sparkle for living. Maybe it is time to do as my mother would do, not as my father did. (c)