A life of one's own

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1. dangAug 2024
   A Life of One's Own is a great book, far ahead of its time (she was using the word 'mindfulness' 90 years ago), and a classic in 'thinking for oneself', something that used to be popular to recommend but has never been easy to do.

   Joanna Field was the pen name of Marion Milner. I have a quote from her in my profile. It took me a long time to track down the paper but that quote was the only interesting thing in it.

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2. superb-owlAug 2024
   A Life of One's Own is incredible, and is one of two books I credit with changing my life.

   I reviewed it partially here: https://superbowl.substack.com/p/how-to-enjoy-things

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3. dangApr 2024
   I'm glad! I finally got a copy of the paper and unfortunately that quote was the only interesting thing in it, as far as I could tell. But Milner is fascinating and did many other things - for example she wrote a brilliant book called "A life of one's own" about experiments she did with self-observation. She was already using the word 'mindfulness' in 1934.
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4. dangNov 2022
   Right you are. I ran across that quote in her collection "The Suppressed Madness of Sane Men". She included the quote but not the paper. I thought it was amazing, so I wanted to read the paper—which was not easy to find. Eventually someone dug me up a copy and... the quote was the only interesting thing in it. But what a quote. I don't know of anything more relevant.

   If any of you want to explore Marion Milner, the place to start is "A Life of One's Own"- a work of original genius: https://www.amazon.com/Life-Ones-Own-Marion-Milner/dp/041555.... Everyone says "think for yourself" but she actually did it. Oh and her brother won the Nobel Prize in physics. Quite a family.

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5. dangFeb 2022
   A Life of One's Own by Marion Milner.
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6. yesenadamOct 2021
   I'm a jazz musician, and often used to do a lot of negative self-talk while playing in public. Like "Oh no, omg that was terrible, oh yuk, oh geez I can't play at all, oh that sounds awful!" etc. I read this book Effortless Mastery that mainly said, never criticize yourself on a gig—do that when you practise but never ever on gigs. So I stopped, and ever since have just had fun. The change was amazing.

   I'm not sure but I think that affected my life in other areas too. Although I read a lot of self-help, psychology, new agey, etc books in my 20s, no one thing helped as much as that. I guess it's part of learning to love yourself. I was trained as a kid and young adult to treat others well, but never to treat myself well! The idea of yourself being one of these people you should treat well, never appeared. You can be so mean to yourself, say truly horrible things you'd never say to a friend or loved one, and hardly notice, if it's something you've always done. And I was bullied a lot at home and school, so treating me badly was something it was easy to also do myself, until I learned just to stop, to never do it. Then when you are kind to yourself, it's natural to be kind to others.

   Some books I remember helping with this: New Guide to Rational Living by Albert Ellis (on becoming aware of your habitual thoughts and self-talk, and changing them for the better where necessary), Wayne Dyer's first two books Your Erroneous Zones and Pulling Your Own Strings (similar to Ellis), Louise Hay on loving yourself, SARK's first 8 books, everything by Robert Fulghum, A Life of One's Own and An Experiment in Leisure by Joanna Field/Marion Milner (psychological self-explorations). Emerson's essays. Also keeping a diary was very useful for seeing patterns, e.g. I'd describe some emotion for what seemed the first time, then see I'd described the same thing 10 times before!

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