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Bouncing Forward: The Art and Science of Cultivating Resilience - Softcover

Haas, Michaela

 
9781501115134: Bouncing Forward: The Art and Science of Cultivating Resilience
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1501115138 ISBN 13: 9781501115134
Verlag: Enliven Books, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

“Engaging stories of modern survival with uplifting and often surprising takeaways.” —Gay Hendricks, PhD, New York Times bestselling author of The Big Leap and Conscious Loving

“Bouncing Forward shows us how adversity can turn us toward our deepest inner resources of trust, wisdom, and love.” —Tara Brach, PhD, author of Radical Acceptance and True Refuge

“Discover the advantages of adversity and find meaning in the messiness…[Bouncing Forward] shows the reader how to cultivate the mindset of resilience that can catalyze healing and growth from catastrophe. Brilliant, inspiring, to be read, re-read, and treasured.” —Linda Graham, MFT, author of Bouncing Back

Thrive in the face of challenges and radically change your perspective on adversity and loss with the cutting-edge science of posttraumatic growth and these powerful methods to grow from victim to survivor in this “great message of hope” (The Huffington Post).

Learn how to become stronger, happier, and more resilient in the face of life’s inevitable setbacks through twelve inspiring stories from survivors of cancer, addiction, PTSD, the Holocaust, loss of a love one, and childhood abuse. Michaela Haas, PhD, presents these stories with practical methods on how to transform pain into a journey to wisdom, love, and purpose.

In Bouncing Forward, Haas draws upon powerful storytelling, psychology, history, and twenty years of Buddhist practice to reshape the way we think of crisis. Through interviews with the late Dr. Maya Angelou, who shares with us how her childhood trauma led her into a passionate life of meaning; ex-POW Rhonda Cornum, who found a new purpose after being captured in Iraq; renowned autistic pioneer Temple Grandin, who overcame crippling panic attacks; and famed jazz guitarist Coco Schumann, who played for his life in Auschwitz, Haas provides a deep understanding of the strength of spirit and five powerful practices to transform your own life. This treasury of wisdom shines a light when life seems overwhelming.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Michaela Haas, PhD, is an international reporter, lecturer, author, and consultant. She is the owner of HAAS live!, an international coaching company that combines her experience in media with mindfulness training. With a PhD in Asian Studies, she has been teaching Buddhism at the University of California Santa Barbara, the University of the West, and various Buddhist centers in America and Europe. She has been studying and practicing Buddhism for almost twenty years. Since the age of sixteen, she has worked as a writer and interviewer for major nationwide German newspapers, magazines, and TV stations, including hosting her own successful nationwide talk show. Michaela divides her time between Malibu, California, and Munich, Germany. Visit MichaelaHaas.com.

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Bouncing Forward 1. Love


“Nobody can do it alone”

Civil rights icon Maya Angelou turned clouds into rainbows1

Only in darkness can you see the stars.

—MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.

How can this end well? A girl, three years old, is sent across the American plains like a postcard. Responsible parents don’t even let their kids walk to kindergarten alone, but nightclub singer Vivian Baxter is getting a divorce, and her brats are now a burden. So Maya and her brother, four, find themselves in a train car all by themselves. The journey takes days. Fellow travelers feed them potato salad, and conductors help them switch trains. Name tags on their wrists prevent them from getting lost: “Marguerite and Bailey Johnson Jr., from Long Beach, California, en route to Stamps, Arkansas”2—a dusty, cotton-picker dump, where racial segregation is so ubiquitous that Marguerite—Maya Angelou—later joked that blacks were not even allowed to eat vanilla ice cream, only chocolate.

Thus begins Maya Angelou’s biography, and this ominous start is only the beginning to a life that will come to know many more incredible episodes, as well as epic battles to erase “the ugly graffiti on the walls of her psyche,” as Bill Moyers once said about her.3

Nightclub dancer, singer, prostitute, pimp, journalist, actress, director, Martin Luther King Jr.’s right-hand woman, America’s national conscience: Maya Angelou’s life has woven the strongest fabric for her thirty books—thirty mirrors she held up to America. She was a pioneer in many disciplines: the first black streetcar conductor in San Francisco; Hollywood’s first black director; the first black poet to read at a presidential inauguration; the first black woman to describe her life in such captivating, drastic terms that her book made the bestseller list for two years in a row. Barack Obama revealed that his mother, a huge fan of the poet, named his sister Maya after her.

Posttraumatic growth is something Maya Angelou knew all about. Despite the many episodes of violence and loss in her life, she learned never to give up. “When it looks like the sun wasn’t gonna shine anymore, God put a rainbow in the clouds. Imagine!”4 She hummed the lyrics from an old African American folk song. “I’ve had a lot of clouds, but I have had so many rainbows.”5

She even had the ceiling in her Harlem town house painted with clouds in a light blue sky. When we talked in the autumn of 2013, Maya Angelou spoke deliberately, every sentence piercing the air as sharp as a pencil. It was one of the last interviews she would give before we lost her bright light just seven months later on May 28, 2014.

During our talk, she sometimes gasped for air because of a collapsed lung, but her passion and candid humor blazed. She confronted her age and arthritis with the same kind of gung ho spirit she brought to life. “When I wake up with pain, I just tell the pain, ‘Get out! I did not invite you into my body!’ I actually say that out loud,” Dr. Angelou rasped in her deep voice, as she looked back on her life with wisdom and verve.
A hurricane and some fierce storms
As abruptly as Vivian Baxter had deported three-year-old Maya and her brother, she ripped them out of Stamps four years later and transplanted them to Saint Louis. The kids rejoiced briefly in the reunion with the bubbly nightclub singer. Maya Angelou described her mother as “a hurricane in its perfect power.”6

Baxter’s boyfriend, Mr. Freeman, took advantage of the mother’s night shifts and preyed on young Maya, raping her before she turned eight. In her famous autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, she gave an account of her rape. She hoped that it would help other survivors of violence. “You can survive rape. You never forget it—don’t even think that. But you can survive it and go on.”7 Freeman ordered her to keep silent, threatening to kill both her and her brother. But when her mother discovered the bloodstained underwear, Maya revealed the name of the rapist. Mr. Freeman was sentenced to a year in prison—and, unbelievably, released the next day.

A few days later the police found his body behind the slaughterhouse, beaten to death. “I thought my voice had killed him,” said Dr. Angelou. “That was my seven-year-old logic, so I stopped talking. My mother’s family and my mother tried their best to woo me away from my mutism, but they didn’t know what I knew: My voice could kill.”8

Dr. Angelou called rape “a dire kind of evil, because rape on the body of a young person more often than not introduces cynicism, and there is nothing quite so tragic as a young cynic, because it means the person has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing. In my case I was saved in that muteness . . . And I was able to draw from human thought, human disappointments and triumphs, enough to triumph myself.”9

Spanking didn’t get Maya to talk either, so Vivian Baxter shoved the sullen, taciturn girl off to her grandmother in Stamps again. This, said Dr. Angelou, “was the best thing that could happen to me!” For five years after the rape, she did not speak. Instead she withdrew into the universe of books, reading every tome on the shelves in the minuscule Stamps library. Perhaps in these speechless years she uncovered the force of language that she later unleashed on artists, civil rights leaders, and presidents. She learned by heart the wise lines of Edgar Allan Poe and Shakespeare’s sonnets, convinced that Shakespeare must have been a black, barefooted chit like her—how else could he have known about abuse and calamity so intimately?
A course book in mastering posttraumatic growth
Maya Angelou is in this book for many reasons. I admire her for her vigorous, emphatic art of writing, for her unabashed self-confidence, her untiring work for women and blacks. A rare and rich treasure of wisdom, she is one of the greatest icons of the civil rights movement and one of the most distinguished African American authors. Her life’s achievements were acknowledged with three Grammys, the National Medal of Arts, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. But I think she also deserved a Nobel Prize for posttraumatic growth. Her life was her greatest piece of art.

Her biography reads like a course book in mastering the vicissitudes of existence. She gave this book its title because when asked how she rose above hardship, she defined her emergence as “bouncing forward, going beyond what the naysayers said.”10 Speaking about the “blessed components of resilience,” she said, “A person who resists being tied down and bound and made less than herself is able, by resisting, not only to be better than the naysayer would believe, but she’s also able to lift up the naysayer.”11
Taking up the battle
Innumerable studies tell us that children like Maya Angelou, who were sexually abused or raised in a climate of poverty and violence, are more prone to posttraumatic stress, depression, addiction, and other severe emotional and physical issues. They are less likely to succeed in society, find and hold well-paying jobs, and develop healthy long-term relationships. Their disadvantage is compounded by the kind of unstable parenting and racial violence that Maya Angelou grew up with. Scientists show that neglect in early childhood leads to lasting changes in people’s brain functions, making them less stress-resistant and more fearful as adults.12 For decades, researchers believed that abused children were doomed to fail.

More than a million children...

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Verlag
Enliven Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2016
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1501115138
ISBN 13 
9781501115134
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
399
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV
info@simonandschuster.nl

Herculesplein 96
Utrecht
3584 AA
Niederlande