(10 hours) #13 Books - SLEEPY Boring Objects (Jason Newland) (30th September 2021)

Hello, welcome to jasonnewland.com. My name is Jason Newland and this is Boring Object. Please only listen when you can safely close your eyes. Now the point, oh that was loud wasn't it, now the point of this podcast is that I just talk about something boring or boringly about something that might be interesting, you know, depends how you look at it.

One person's boring subject is another person's passion, you know, so the point really is that while I talk about this boring ting your mind can relax, you can let go and you may even find that you drift off to sleep. So my advice is, you know, get yourself comfortable, sitting in a comfortable chair that supports your body or sitting or lying down rather on your bed or sofa or sitting up in your bed if that's what you choose.

Remembering that you can change your physical position at any time to improve your physical comfort because that's the most important thing really for you to be comfortable.

Now today I'm going to talk about books. To be fair I could probably do quite a few of these recordings on books and I might do actually. But this is going to be the first one because books have been quite a big part of my life since the age of five probably.

So I spent many years collecting books. And I don't have a huge collection now. I think I've got about 400 books.

But you know, I used to have a lot more. But I go through periods when I, if there's a subject that I'm interested in. For example, back in 2003, I became very interested in Asperger's.

So I bought every book there was to buy on the subject and read them all. Another example, I did a course in reflexology. I did two courses actually.

And again, bought every book I could buy, could find on reflexology and read them all. The first thing you know, I could tell you about that is if you buy lots of books on the same subject, you kind of read the same thing often. You know, there's a lot of repetition there.

But I think it kind of cements it in. Well, for me, it's cemented the knowledge into my brain. Although I've forgotten a lot about reflexology because it's such a long time ago.

Chronic pain is another thing. I was very interested, still am, but very interested in chronic pain. 20 years ago, and I bought loads of books on chronic pain.

Not just, well, I was interested in chronic pain relief techniques. But there was more books on the subject of chronic pain, what causes it, you know, the anatomy of pain and various pharmaceutical interventions with pain with a medicine, also, you know, operations and stuff like that, surgical. I also had a book on chronic pain in the end of life and chronic pain, you know, pain, people with cancer and various illnesses and diseases.

So I kind of engulfed myself, but you know, I got involved in a lot of that information and tried to absorb as much as possible. But my main aim really was to help people to relieve their chronic pain, which is why I ended up doing and still make recordings, but perhaps not as much as I should, perhaps because the chronic pain relief stuff has never been hugely popular with my audience.

Although I started out wanting to help people with chronic pain, the relaxation sessions and the sleep sessions were the ones that had the most audience.

So although I do have one podcast, which is stress and pain relief podcast. So that's kind of mixing the two together because I discovered that when you reduce the stress in someone that has chronic pain, you reduce the physical discomfort of that chronic pain issue. Anyway, I'm not here to talk about chronic pain.

No. And my first book I ever had was Jackanory book. And I got it.

I was living in a children's home. And we had this fair or you know, is it a fair or like a jumble sale or something. And that was one of the things that was on the jumble sale and I bought it for or someone gave it to me.

I don't know if I had any money. And that was my first book that I owned of my own. That I remember, you know, I might have had books when I was very little, I don't don't recall.

But this is my first book that I kept hold of. And I'd reread it over and over again. I've even kind of almost there's a smell connected to it.

I don't have it anymore. But I had it, I kept it for quite a long time. And then when I was in junior school, so let's say probably my my next memory really of books was when I was about nine.

And I've been through quite a few different schools. But there's this one school. And in the English lesson, we were reading and writing and you know, sort of trying to learn all that stuff.

And the teacher let me take books home. So what I would do is I would take a book home and I would read the whole thing overnight, and then take it back again, and then take another book. And I do that, you know, every day.

And these weren't big books. It's not like it was an encyclopedia or saw 800 pages. But I loved reading, loved, loved, loved reading, probably more than anything else.

It was just one of my favorite things. And then I joined the library, the local library, probably around the age of 10, probably, maybe 1110. Suddenly, I had all of these books that I could read huge amounts, huge, you know, obviously 1000s and 1000s.

So what I would do, I don't for some reason, I had a real and love for new books. You know, crispy new net, you know, ones that didn't have, because in those days, you'd have the stamp on the inside of the date when it needed to be returned. And the card, the library card and the little card, there was a little card inside a little pouch of the book.

And they'd take that out when you lent when they lent it out to you. And they'd put it into a little box little filing cabinet thing. No computerized stuff or anything like that.

No barcodes to scan. It was just very simple. Or more complicated, maybe I don't know, I guess.

I'm not sure. So I started reading the books in the library. And I could literally spend hours in there just looking at the different books going through them and finding what I wanted to read, maybe reading them in there.

So the library was one of my favorite places to go to. And it wasn't a big library. It was an okay size.

But it was, I liked it. I did, I liked the library. And so I read lots of books.

And then when I got to about the age of 12, maybe 11 or 12. I had my own money. You know, I had part time jobs, paper rounds and things like that.

So I was suddenly able to buy my own books. So I started my own book collection. And I used to like, I kind of would read anything really, I was quite interested in quite like comedy.

The wilt books were good. In fact, I've still I've actually rebought them a few years back. So I've got all of those still.

I like science fiction, I went through a period when I used to read Star Trek books, like loads of them. But you know, the originals, you know, series, Captain Kirk and Spocky. I used to read those books.

And I enjoyed them more than actually watching the show. So that was something what I used to do sometimes. Because I've, I guess I've always had a bit of a bit of a mood issue, disorder, whatever, going back all the way to being a child.

So sometimes I just needed to be left alone. I didn't want to be outside playing or getting into trouble. Sometimes I really did, you know, I'd love to be outside and, you know, just having fun.

But I went through periods when all I wanted to do is to be left alone. And I'd find someplace hidden away inside the building, the school, and I'd, you know, some back stairs somewhere, a back entrance to the classroom, whatever. And I'd read a book during my lunch, have my sandwich and I'd read a book.

So there's that. And then I guess once the, once my family, you know, found out that I like books, I used to get bought books for birthdays and Christmases and stuff. And there was a period because I was quite interested in astronomy.

So my parents bought me a telescope. And then like every, every birthday, whatever, they'd always end up buying me an astronomy book for some reason. And I'll be honest, I used to read them.

But I didn't understand half of what I was reading. Genuinely, there's these really complicated books, I didn't really know. And I read the Stephen Hawking's brief history of time.

When I was probably about 16. I didn't understand it. Not really.

I read it. I didn't, I don't think I really comprehended what he was talking about. And I remember I sat on the beach when I was about 17.

And I read the, the life story of Sigmund Freud. And that was this paperback, but it's a thick old book. And I read all of that.

Again, I'm not sure I understood as much as perhaps I could have done. It was, it was a very, was a very specialized subject really, isn't it? I talked about psychoanalysis and where it came from. And maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe that was so the seeds of my, you know, my future life, you know, getting into hypnosis, and then training and getting a degree in counseling.

So perhaps that was that, you know, reading that book, although not comprehending all of it. I, yeah, maybe that, that helped me towards the future. The future me.

I'm just trying to think. Oh, yeah, in the early, so I used to read books, and then I went through a period where I didn't really read at all. I mean, really, between late teens, once I left school at 15.

Although I did read occasionally, you know, as I said, the books I mentioned, I didn't read too much. I didn't really read a lot of books. I was working quite long hours sometimes.

And when I wasn't working, I guess I wanted to go to the pub or, you know, do something else. Plus, I didn't have any money. I didn't have any spare money to buy books.

I had more spare money when I was at school with my paper round money than I did when I was actually working full time for the first couple of years. And then, I don't remember really reading hardly anything again until about 1989. That might sound a bit specific.

But in 1989, I, I traveled through France with a complete stranger who we picked up as he was a hitchhiking, and I was on the way to Kent, actually, with the people I live with, and they were going on holiday and they didn't want to leave me in their house on my own. I was going to have a party or something. So I was going to go camping for a week.

And we picked this hitchhiker up and I ended up going to France for the week with him. And he ended up being a good friend. And he was quite, I suppose, a bit of an intellectual.

And he, he basically gave me a list of books to read that he thought I'd like. And I think one was The Road Less Traveled. The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Another one was The Third Wave. And that's three that I remember. So he gave me this list of books.

And in 1989, near the end of the year, I had an eye test and I got some new glasses and it made reading easier because the glasses I had before were a bit out of focus. I hadn't really bothered because I wasn't really reading much at the time. And I really got into it again, really got into reading.

And in the early 90s, I started buying a lot of books and reading a lot of books on poetry. I was very interested in the what's it called the beat beat movement. So I was reading books like Jack Kerouac, books by Allen Ginsberg, On the Road by Kerouac.

And lots of other like, is it Neil Cassidy, various different authors from that time. And then I discovered Bukowski. And I was reading his books.

And I know technically he's not a beat author. He did know those people. He did meet them.

And he was, he wasn't really into smoking or things like that. He was just into drinking. So he and his class is one of the great American authors.

So Kerouac, not Kerouac, Bukowski, Bukowski. And I read, he did both novels and poetry. So I read all of those books.

I had pretty much all of his books at one point. And then I started buying books on little by books, Buddhism, I became very interested in Buddhism, started buying books and reading books on various types of Buddhism. Really interested in Zen.

And he used to read books on cones or koans. I don't know how you pronounce it. And so I've read a lot of that stuff.

So that was sort of what I was interested then. And then, in kind of the middle 90s, I became interested in selling. And even though I hadn't sold anything, or really been a salesperson, I tried a few sales jobs that were commission only, and I could never last for more than about five days and I had to leave.

But I had an interest going all the way back to 1980, yeah, 1989. When I was doing double glazing, canvassing, knocking on people's doors, seeing if they're interested in having a quotation and all that stuff. All that groovy stuff.

And I started reading sales books back then. And I just, just really was interested, especially hearing about the lifestyle of these salesmen in America that were doing really well, like Victor Kayyem. And it just looked like such a great job to have.

Highly paid if you're really good at what you did. But a lot of fun as well, you know. And I quite like that idea, like dressing really well and living a really nice lifestyle.

So I got really interested in reading, I read a lot of sales books. But nothing came of it, you know, I'd be sitting there as a security guard, sitting in some office, reading a sales book and reading about people that were wealthy and doing really well with their jobs. And I was sitting there with my little uniform on a little costume, security costume and earning minimum wage.

But I had that little dream I wanted to do. I knew I wanted to do something more than what I was doing. And then in the late 90s, like 97, I started reading self-help books.

And, you know, positivity and stuff like that. So I got really into, because I already had a little bit of a head start with that by reading the motorcycle maintenance and the road less traveled, because they were two really huge books in the self-help sector. And I started reading books from, what's his name? Oh, blimey.

The Awaken the Giant Within. I forget his name now, it's gone out my head. But yeah, I started reading books on positivity and creativity and how to basically try and deal with stuff, you know.

How to, I don't want to use words to better myself, but I guess in a way. Oh, also I did read a lot of books on meditation in the early 90s as well, the middle 90s, during my Buddhist kind of phase. So I collected quite a few books and I started listening to audio tapes as well.

So listening to audio tapes like The Alchemist, is it Jonathan Livingstone's Seagull, among many others. You know, how to be positive. What was his name? The Mr. Positivity Man.

I forget his name now, but he did quite a few. And then there's also the Carnegie book, How to Make Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie. So there's a lot of books that I read and listen to on audio tape.

And during that time, I bought lots of books. And then I got interested in hypnosis. And I bought huge amounts of books on hypnosis, any every book I could get hold of, I bought, and in NLP as well.

And during that time, I started to become interested in therapy, like psychotherapy, gestalt therapy, counseling, quite a few books on Carl Rogers, Virginia Satir, CBT, all those kinds of things. And then I moved and I got into sales, I started doing sales work. At the beginning of 2000s in 2001.

Before that I was into the internet and into building websites. So I had lots of books on that on coding and how to build websites and all that stuff. So I quite a few of those books.

And then in 2001, I kind of took a break from hypnosis or any of the other stuff. And I was focusing on selling and I was reading a lot of selling books, positive books and trying to listen to audio tapes up from Zig Ziglar. He was one of the main people back then.

So yeah, that was that was kind of what I was into then. And then in 2002, I started going to the Buddhist Center. So nearly 10 years after I actually got interested in Buddhism, I went to a Buddhist Center.

And I no longer had any Buddhist books at that point. So I started buying more Buddhist books. So I started a collection of Buddhist books and I had, I think I had about 100 and I ended up giving them to the Buddhist Center when I moved to a different town.

So I've still got some Buddhist books, but not many. So I used to buy them and read them. And then I suppose I was still buying hypnosis books after that.

So even in like 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, I was buying hypnosis books. I started to look for rarer books like on eBay, books that are out of print. So my, my book collection on hypnosis was quite a good collection.

I had, I was living in quite a large room actually, at the time, near the end of the 2000s. Like 2000, between 2005 to 2007, I had, I think I had about six bookcases full of books. So there's probably about a thousand books I probably had, maybe a little bit less.

And then I moved to a tiny little room that didn't have enough room for my books. So I ended up getting rid of a lot of them. I also had quite a few books on philosophy as well, as well as psychotherapy.

And then I started a degree course in counseling. And the first two years was learning to be a client, a person centered rather, counselor, which is Carl Rogers, a Rogerian. So having read all those books 10 years earlier was quite weird really.

Suddenly I'm doing this course. So I'm rereading the books that I read before. And during that period, I didn't really buy any books.

I got a few books I needed from the library, but I didn't have enough room really to buy any new books. And I ended up giving away most of my books to charity, because I just kept tripping over them. There was so many, and there was no room.

Which is a little bit, it's a bit sad, but hey, I kept hold of the, I kept hold of the hypnosis books and therapy books, because I was doing a therapy course, where all the others went. And then I moved, and I still had quite a lot of books still. I still had about five or six containers, like big plastic containers full of books.

It's just I'd got rid of probably half of them at that point. And so I lived in this other room, which is a bigger room again, which is quite good. So I lived there.

And I kept the books and that's fine. And then I moved again to a tiny little place again, another little room. And there was no room and the books, the books started to get moldy because I left them in the cupboard and there was mold, which ruined a lot of books.

And I ended up losing most of my book collection through that and some other stuff. So I kind of didn't know if I could be bothered to build the book collection up again after that. Plus, I wasn't reading anything.

I just didn't, wasn't always working and I didn't really read much. And then before I moved here, I started buying a few extra books again, but I only like the most important ones from the previous library that I had. And I moved here and this is a bit more stable and I've bought, um, yeah, it's just a couple of hundred books.

That's about it, I think. And of course, I've got quite a few hypnosis books that I had before, some that I didn't have before. And, but I don't buy, I don't buy books as often as I used to because online you can get hold of so much stuff.

Uh, you can read PDF files, uh, with the whole book on there. You just read it on a laptop or on the tablet or on your Kindle or whatever. Although it's not the same, it's not the same as actually having the book.

But some of these books I'm reading cost like 40, 50 pound to buy because they're specialist. So it seems the, the, the less of an audience an author has, the more expensive the book's going to be. And I think some of these books are just, they're doctorates, thesis, which are then turned into a book.

And over the last few years, I mean, I can't even remember the last time I purchased a book. It's been quite a while. And at the moment I have right in front of, well to the right of me, I've got my book collection, just the hypnosis books, pretty much that's all that's there in front of me now.

NLP and hypnosis books and all the other stuff is now in the storage cupboards on the other bookcases that I run before. So move them out to make more room in here. I like looking at them.

I sound weird, but I quite like looking at them. It's nice to have them there to remind me of books that I have read. So a lot of these books, not all of them, I'll admit, but a lot of them I've read more than once.

So yeah, that's my story of books. Books. So thank you for listening.

Remember to be kind to yourself because you deserve to be happy. Be nice to yourself. Be gentle today.

Lots of love. Bye.