Healing for the Soul: Doses and Medicines

Years ago, I read that Jewish parents would put honey on the cover of books and let their small children lick it off, to teach them the sweetness of books and learning. What a beautiful image!

Two millennia ago, Pharaoh Rameses II, had an inscription carved above the portal to his library: “place of healing for the soul.” 

Of all the power that knowledge brings, it is interesting that his focus was on personal healing.

I accidentally began a literary liturgy of healing a few months ago. In response to dramatic changes in my life, my mind had begun to fall into ruts of worry and fear. As I realized that I had less control over my future than I have ever had before, worst-case-scenarios filled my mind. Impatient for closure, my mind incessantly searched for solutions.

And I realized my mind was wrong.

I began to recognize this flow of events as a river that must be rafted—a series of experiences that I must allow, follow, and from which I must learn. I read quotes about replacing negative thoughts with constructive thoughts. If my mind was going to circle paths, on the edge of my consciousness, until it wore deep grooves, I must mark out healthy paths.

I turned the future over to my God, which was a sweet experience in itself. I formed a plan to implement healthy individual and family habits. I was promised that my future would unfold as it should, if I would just keep moving in the direction I was currently headed. With my present and my future secure, it was time to find a place of healing.

And so, I began to read. And read and read. I am still reading.  Especially at night, when I am tempted to brood, I read and I write. Devouring mostly non-fiction, I experience the heights and depths of human experience; this personalized parade of true stories shows me that pain and uncertainty are the price we pay for this thrilling life. My own suffering is put into perspective and now gratitude is my daily companion.

There is name for this miracle in my life: bibliotherapy.

A recent New Yorker article, “Can Reading Make You Happier?” brings up some interesting points:

 “For all readers who have been self-medicating with great books their entire lives, it comes as no surprise that reading books can be good for your mental health and your relationships with others, but exactly why and how is now becoming clearer, thanks to new research on reading’s effects on the brain. Since the discovery, in the mid-nineties, of “mirror neurons”—neurons that fire in our brains both when we perform an action ourselves and when we see an action performed by someone else—the neuroscience of empathy has become clearer. A 2011 study published in the Annual Review of Psychology, based on analysis of fMRI brain scans of participants, showed that, when people read about an experience, they display stimulation within the same neurological regions as when they go through that experience themselves. We draw on the same brain networks when we’re reading stories and when we’re trying to guess at another person’s feelings….

Reading has been shown to put our brains into a pleasurable trance-like state, similar to meditation, and it brings the same health benefits of deep relaxation and inner calm. Regular readers sleep better, have lower stress levels, higher self-esteem, and lower rates of depression than non-readers. ‘Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines,’ the author Jeanette Winterson has written…

George Eliot, who is rumored to have overcome her grief at losing her life partner through a program of guided reading with a young man who went on to become her husband, believed that:

'art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot'…

After the First World War, traumatized soldiers returning home from the front were often prescribed a course of reading. ‘Librarians in the States were given training on how to give books to WWI vets, and there’s a nice story about Jane Austen’s novels being used for bibliotherapeutic purposes at the same time in the U.K.,’ Elderkin says. Later in the century, bibliotherapy was used in varying ways in hospitals and libraries, and has more recently been taken up by psychologists, social and aged-care workers, and doctors as a viable mode of therapy"

To borrow some lines from Shakespeare’s “Titus Andronicus”:

A good friend of mine shared that, after the loss of her baby son, she read Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Its themes of death and loss gave voice to her grief. She also sought out blogs of individuals who had experienced similar loss and felt a sense of understanding and being understood.

I have discovered that we can make deep connections through the written word. We feel deeper empathy for others. We connect with a deeper Self. We vicariously experience with a wide range of emotions. We can even connect to God.

I hold my next book in my hands, savoring its weight. I inhale its new-book smell. Its pages are dripping with the promise of many interesting hours. When I put this book down at its finish, I will be a slightly different person than when I picked it up. In my mind’s eye, I lick the honey off the cover. Then I settle in for a few moments with a blanket and a cup of mint tea.

Delicious.