The books that changed us — Niloo’s Story

We think that growth and change happen slowly, over time, and they do. But they also happen in an instant, in a moment of insight that makes sense of our struggles and questions.

Whether from an excerpt in a book or movie, or from a friend’s passing remark, we carry these insights with us, and it changes us.

These moments of insight come to us at exactly the right time, when we’ve gone through an experience, or are grappling with a question. And they put into words a feeling or idea that we’ve been trying to but haven’t quite grasped.

I want to share with you some of the books that changed me, in the hopes that they may spark something for you too.

My Books:

1. Mastery by Robert Greene
2. The Other Song: Discovering Your Parallel Self by Rajan Sankaran
3. Come as You Are: The Surprising New Science that Will Transform Your Sex Life by Emily Nagoski
4. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
5. Get the Guy: How to Find, Attract and Keep Your Ideal Mate by Matthew Hussey

My Story:

1. Mastery by Robert Greene

This book was so profound for me that I wrote an entire other blog post about it. I was at a point in my life where my past seemed scattered, and my future unclear. It felt like I hadn’t picked a path or didn’t have direction. I couldn’t commit to an “industry” professionally. And my skillset felt very broad, not something that fit into any “job” or career path I saw around me. There was a conflict within me, between feeling fulfilled and being successful. I didn’t know exactly what was missing, just that no job I could get would truly satisfy me.

Reading this book, and seeing the way Greene had laid out the stories of all these masters throughout history, I realized we are all wired differently and attuned to different things. If we want to find our path, we can’t follow other people or blindly apply their advice or experience to our lives. Other people can’t truly understand our unique experience, just as we can’t understand theirs. For us to follow what they say is to turn a blind eye to who we truly are and what makes us happy. It’s a recipe for a mediocre, unfulfilled life.

Instead, we have to look inward, at our inner driving forces, to understand what we’re uniquely attuned to do. When we have this understanding of our inner self, our life finds meaning, direction and purpose. Every single master in Greene’s book, regardless of being an artist, scientist or fighter pilot, understood this, and lived a life that was guided by their own curiosity and inner drive, rather than societal pressures or ideals of what success looks like.

2. The Other Song: Discovering Your Parallel Self by Rajan Sankaran

This book introduced me to The Sensation Method, the holistic framework Hello Iris is based on. The Sensation Method believes that every single part of you is connected. That what you say, think, feel, and do, every physical pain and dream you experience, when taken to its deepest level, leads to a single pattern. Every part of your existence is a manifestation of this pattern. A single sensation that is unique to you.

The book talks about how our inner sensation shapes the way we experience stress and conflict. It was mind-blowing to me to realize that our personalities are not shaped by static traits, but by an inner experience that defines our perception of reality. That each one of us is acting in the best way possible, based on the way we’re experiencing a situation. And that conflict and miscommunication happen because we each see something different at the centre of our reality. Something the other person can’t understand.

The Sensation Method comes with over 250 unique sensation profiles, each with their own sensitivities and responses to stress and conflict. These profiles don’t outline your “personality traits” the way most personality tests do, but bring out the inner experience that is the reason behind your personality traits. The reason why you feel and behave the way you do.

When I read my sensation profile, I couldn’t help but cry. It was as if someone had gone to the deepest depths of my soul and pulled out something that I couldn’t even consciously acknowledge or express. I couldn’t believe how accurate and specific to me the profile was. It felt like magic.

Becoming aware of this concept and of my own experience changed my life in the most fundamental way. I understood that all the stresses and insecurities that I thought I had to “fix” were a part of an inner experience that is real and valid. I was able to accept and understand myself, and apply the same level of empathy to others, understanding that they also are operating from an inner experience that is just as valid as mine, even though it’s different.

This book is the reason I built Hello Iris. The Sensation Method revolutionized my life and helped me transform from somebody who was never happy or satisfied, who couldn’t form relationships with others, and was always on an emotional rollercoaster, to one who is truly happy, who feels fulfilled and well-adjusted, and can engage with conflict and stress without letting them overtake her.

I built Hello Iris to share The Sensation Method with more people so that it could change their lives the way it changed mine.

3. Come as You Are: The Surprising New Science that Will Transform Your Sex Life by Emily Nagoski

This book was the one that introduced me to the concept of “unchosen beliefs”, and the how information and ideas that you unconsciously internalize from your environment play such a big part in shaping your life, and your relationship with yourself and others.

Growing up, I didn’t have a good relationship with sex. I had internalized from my family and culture that sex is gross and disgusting, and something that you just “let” a guy do to you. Thinking about sex, or wanting it to be pleasurable made me feel guilty. I also felt that wanting sex made you “easy”, or the kind of girl a guy wouldn’t want to commit to longterm. Needless to say, my early twenties were fraught with feelings of insecurity and self-loathing, and an inability to form fulfilling romantic relationships.

At some point in my life, I just accepted the fact that “I don’t enjoy sex”. I felt so self-conscious about my body and what I “should” be doing during sex, that I could never have an orgasm. I felt like there was something wrong with me, and that there was nothing I could do about it.

Reading this book, and understanding what was actually happening in my mind and body at a biological level felt like a veil was lifting from my eyes. All those sensations and feelings that I had internalized as abnormal had a scientific explanation. All the parts of my body that I felt uncomfortable with were perfectly normal and natural, and an inherent part of being a human woman.

It felt crazy to me that I had caused myself so much pain for so long over something that was a part of my “humanness”. Seeing it laid out like that, the idea of ascribing moral or symbolic meaning to biological functions, to your body doing what it was designed to do, felt ridiculous.

Understanding my body in this way gave me the power to not only examine the toxic beliefs about sex I’d internalized, but to actually overcome them, because I could see so clearly that they were wrong.

4. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

When I read Slaughterhouse-Five, I had been experimenting with psychedelic drugs for a few years, using them to break out of my daily thought patterns and access a higher plane of consciousness.

I wasn’t an active member of the “psychedelic drug community”, but would plan a “trip” every 6 to 8 months as a way to reconnect with the world and step outside of myself. During the course of my trips, I had scattered visions and thoughts about the nature of time and space, as well as life and the universe.

I remember one particular vision about time so vividly. I could see time as something we can move through, the same way we move through space. Moments are static structures that our consciousness can step in and out of the same way we can go in and out of a room.

I remember sitting on one side of the room, and seeing myself sitting on the other side of the room as I’d been 30 minutes before, as if that was just another “place” I could go to whenever I wanted. In that moment the nature of time seemed so intuitive and obvious to me. But of course, after the trip, it all became hazy. I knew there was something there, I remembered what I’d seen, but I couldn’t fully wrap my head around it. What did what I’d seen mean about the universe? About life? About death? Was it a real “vision” based on truth, or just a drug-addled hallucination?

Reading Slaughterhouse-Five was like finding the holy grail. I came across the book randomly, not knowing what it was about or expecting that it would have anything to do with time. When I read it, I got goosebumps. I couldn’t believe this book had taken my vision and turned it into a story. And not just that, but that it went beyond what I had seen to describe what the nature of time meant for our existence in the universe at large.

These complex, incomprehensible topics were laid out in this book in such a simple, succinct way and woven into a fictional story about a guy who gets abducted by aliens. I just couldn’t believe it. It felt like the secrets of the universe were all in this book, hiding in plain sight right in front of us.

5. Get the Guy: How to Find, Attract and Keep Your Ideal Mate by Matthew Hussey

I’m a little hesitant to include this book on the list, and I have to say that I didn’t finish reading the whole thing. At this point in my life, I don’t believe in the idea of employing “how to” tactics to “improve your game”, and that’s not what I want to endorse here. Even still, I have to admit that this book (or rather the one chapter I read from it), had a profound impact in my life.

For most of my life, I had been told that I was a smart person, but not a good person. Not someone who is inherently kind or friendly, or who can connect with others in a meaningful way. Persians have a saying for this, that roughly translates to “bitter meat”. Somebody who’s not easy to get along with is said to have “bitter meat”.

“Bitter meat” was something I heard about myself all the time as a child, and I internalized it. I believed that you just are the way you are, and that you’re born either as someone who is friendly and social, or as someone who’s not. I accepted the fact that I was not “a people person” pretty early on in life, and as I grew up, felt myself fill up with more hate and resentment towards everyone else, for being able to do something that I couldn’t.

I tried to be as smart as possible and get ahead on merit alone, but at every turn I was thwarted because I couldn’t form connections with people. It felt extremely unfair that someone who was less qualified than me would always get the job over me because they were more pleasant to be around. It felt unfair that some people just had the “social genes” while others like me didn’t and were destined to fail because of it.

I picked up this book precisely because I felt like I couldn’t naturally connect with others, and needed a rulebook to tell me what to do. About 4 or 5 pages in, there was a passage about exactly what I was going through. The book brought out the misconception that we all think we’re born either social or not, but the truth is that every single one of us is born social, because we are all human beings, who are social animals. It is a part of our genetic makeup and survival strategy to form bonds with others and maneuver complex social structures.

The book outlined that being social is a skill we all have to work to cultivate. It felt really empowering to read that. To know that I was normal, and that there were concrete things I could do to become more social and have more meaningful relationships with others.

This book was a great stepping stone for me, because through some simple tips and exercises (like asking people for their names when you talk to them, or always striking up a conversation with the cashier when you shop from a store) it allowed me to practice being social. It felt daunting and intimidating at first, but I was blown away to see that even a little bit of effort and interest in others goes such a long way.

This was the book that really let me experience and develop a growth mindset about every aspect of my life, because it showed me that even what I had internalized about myself as my most fixed flaw, could and did change. I don’t agree with everything this book has to say, but I’m still grateful to it, because it helped me become someone who can care about and connect with the people around her.