Your Sneak Peek
Enjoy some exclusive excerpts from the book!
"I am crawling on my hands and knees in the dust. By the fence on my right, a little ahead of me, is my elder brother Joost (pron. yoast). We get to the gap in the chain-link fence we've been looking for. Now we get down on our bellies and crawl under the fence. There are some greens on the other side; it is our job to find edible weeds to use as supplements to our meager food supplies. I am eager to help, quickly pick a few leaves, and proudly show these to my brother.
“No” he says gently. “I’ll show you what we want.” He then finds a patch of purslane and says: “That is what is really good, see if you can find more of these.”
I pick a few leaves and taste them. The taste is a little sour but it is the best thing I had ever tasted. With renewed enthusiasm we continue to harvest this bounty."
"When I was ten I was returned to my real family. My parents had returned from Indonesia and my brother had come home from boarding school. Although our family was reunited, I remember family dinners were never without tension. My father drank too much and had a terrible temper, which was totally unpredictable. We would be having dinner and out of the blue one of us would be slapped on the back of the head, or receive a blow on our knuckles with a soup spoon. I was beaten two or three times a week.
For many years, I tended to attract people who had anger issues. I replayed my reaction to my father’s anger whenever anyone around me raised his or her voice. Today I know that the purpose of attracting these “angry” people is to heal a belief I have made up: that I am not safe, that it is all my fault, that I am guilty. Today anger does not affect me and I am now very rarely even remotely disturbed when confronted with anger."
"Isolated by self-loathing, I became a seeker. Some small part of me desperately needed to know: Other than this vile creature, what else is in me? What is the point? Why was my world the way that it was? Having no one to turn to, no trusted adult by my side, I devoured a world of books for the answers. By the time I was sixteen or seventeen I’d read everything I could get my hands on: Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Camus, Sartre—you name it, I read it. I read everything and everyone, and every time I’d open a new book and start reading, I’d think, “Wow, this is incredible!” only to become disillusioned shortly thereafter. There were no real answers for me in the books I read, nothing practical that I could apply to my life to help me figure it out, nothing that led in a consistent fashion towards a reasonable understanding of what this life is all about.
Then one night, in the midst of this internal chaos, I awoke in a state of unspeakable peace, joy, and clarity. I had seen something in this state—something I had been deeply searching for. I had seen the answer to my question."
"The only reason to tell the story of my early years is to demonstrate unequivocally that whatever happened to you and me when we were young does not have the power to keep us prisoner for life. I have seen too many people recover from unspeakable early life trauma, people who had been told they would never ‘get over’ their past.
My story is not who I am, either. It led me to believe that I was a monster, but that is not who I truly am. I was fortunate enough to experience my true Self when I was a teenager, and that knowledge kept me from completely self-destructing, and it eventually led me back to my Self. I know the truth of who you really are, because that is the Truth for both you and me. In the following chapters, I’ll show you how your current identity came about. Then we’ll begin the work of deconstructing it, which will enable you to connect to profound inner peace and contentment."
