Monday, April 27, 2015

Book Review: Transformation Soup

A Fair Trade Book

Title: Transformation Soup
        
Author: Susan Ariel Rainbow Kennedy (SARK)

Author's web site: http://planetsark.com/
        
Date: 2000
        
Publisher: Fireside
        
ISBN: 0-684-85976-9
        
Length: 200 pages of graphics and calligraphy, many in color
        
Quote: “This is Sark, healing her tender little self.”
        
This is a calligrapher’s guide to emotional healing from whatever breakups, childhood unhappiness, fears, and other emotional burdens we have. If you can’t actually be there, at least you can read about “a hospital for the brokenhearted. There would be: Daily neck and shoulder massages. Movies about self-love and transformation. Growing things. Hugs from children. Clean sheets and hot meals. A padded, soundproof room in which to release anger. Punching bags. Community to cry with. Inner beauty makeovers. New clothes and haircuts. Radio playing no love songs. Library with no happy love stories. Stacks of blank journals and art supplies. Supportive reminders from friends. Accelerated healing and time passing faster.”
        
Part of the support group experience in which people help one another heal from losses is laughing at the stupid remarks people bring in, often straight out of their therapist’s clinic. (They don’t realize how irrelevant the therapist’s wise thought will be to someone else’s real life.) Often the stupidity of these remarks is situational, as when +kathleen wallace assumed in blithe ignorance that I could spend less money on insurance or cable TV than I do (I've never subscribed to either, duh!)...but here’s one that should induce gales of out-loud guilty laughter: “It’s embarrassing to admit that I love change when it suits or benefits me, or the world, or those I love. Change that I don’t understand alarms me.” Uh...most of the world has been talking about desirable and undesirable change for, like, 3000 years now in the European languages alone...
        
On the other hand, this one is wiser than it sounds: “The reason we can’t find  cure for the common cold is that the common cold is the cure.” Exactly. The boring minor symptoms known as a common cold are the way the body eliminates toxins, germs, and allergens. Tiresome as a cold may be, it’s actually the cure for something nastier that you wouldn’t have felt before it was too late if your immune system hadn’t been doing its job. You can exercise, cut back on junk food and animal fats, drink more water and eat more fibre to give your immune system an easier job and minimize your common colds, later.
        
Meanwhile Sark offers lots of deliberate, delightful silliness to ease the healing process: “Exercise feels so good only after doing it, and sometimes during it. Before doing it is the chasm to be crossed.”
        
“Maybe I need an aging support group, although I haven’t found people really wanting to acknowledge or talk about it....I surround myself with people in their 20s and 30s and then sometimes envy their young skin, energy levels, or whatever else.”
        
“Put iridescent glitter in your bath.”
        
The “Healing School Curriculum” on pages 146-148 is worth the price of the book all by itself. If you once had a sweetheart and now you have none, you need Transformation Soup.



Sark seems to manage her own Amazon page nicely but, if you want to buy her books as Fair Trade Books, send salolianigodagewi @ yahoo.com $5 per book + $5 per package, and we will send $1 out of that $10 to Sark or a charity of her choice. 

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