I love book covers and I love the cover for Shelter From Our Secrets, Silence & Shame. I am delighted to have Rebecca Brown visiting fundinmental to share her own thoughts on the cover.

Topic: Discuss your cover — how it came to be, what it represents, what you love or don’t love about it, etc.  Anything you’d like to share about it.

I’m excited to be part of this Fundinmental blog tour, and I love that I can take this opportunity to talk about my book’s cover.  I know that we shouldn’t judge a book by it’s cover, but I wanted my book’s cover to catch people’s attention and hopefully draw them to it and start reading. 

I took the photograph myself in May 2021 when I was out in my kayak on Lake Huron, where I am lucky to live and work as a mental health clinician.  I need to find ways to burn off and let go of the difficult stories that I collect in my day.  One of my favourite ways to release the stress is to paddle into the sunset and feel the tension release from my body.  I begin my book with this prologue: 

I am floating. 

On the water 

calm 

clear  

soft  

quiet.  

Dusk, 

the sun is setting. 

The sky will hold light  

for another half an hour  

or so. 

The beauty is often just after the sun sinks into the water,
then the colours are spectacular. 

Or just softer.  

It’s been a long day;  

hard  

heavy 

yet healing.  

I have no words left in me.  

I cannot talk 

or listen anymore.  

I need quiet  

peace 

calm  

presence. 

I have found the shelter that I seek today 

on the open water.  

My kayak is my shelter this day. 

I will paddle until I physically feel the release in my body.  

I will watch the sun set until I find the peace in my soul. 

I hope to sleep tonight.
 

Rebuild my resilience. 

I will wake and do it all again. 

I may need to seek shelter differently tomorrow 

Or not. 

Knowing that I must still seek shelter sometimes,  

makes it safe for me to continue in this work that I love.

Later in the book, I share a chapter which digs further into why this particular photograph means so much to me.

Chapter Fourteen: Spring 2021

  I couldn’t wait to get my little yellow kayak in the water. It had been three years since I moved to the shores of the Great Lake Huron. We live in a home that has a story of its own (more on this to come), and it was built to look out at the beautiful water, which is a gift we cherish every day. The sunsets have been called among the most beautiful in the world, and the water itself changes from day to day: from calm, like glass, to rough and choppy. We’ve referred to it as both Lake Atlantic and the Pond Lake, all within twenty-four hours.    The soft sand and miles of beach are what draw people from afar, but what makes it the most magnificent sight always is its colour. The water looks almost tropical. It can resemble a Caribbean turquoise blue, so soft that it takes your breath away. Looking at the colour of this beautiful water is a moment of awe that I treasure every day.

  We’ve had a warm, mild spring, and this year feeling confined to the house, working from home, unable to see people in person, I have been trying to spend even more time outdoors in nature and, as often as possible, down at the water.

  On May 17, our temperature rose to twenty degrees Celsius (68 F), and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. After dinner, I pulled my little yellow kayak out from under the deck where it had been stored all winter. I hosed it off to get rid of any spiders and dirt that had been hiding there all winter, and within half an hour had it in the water.

  Due to the State of Emergency and lockdown in our area, there was virtually no one in the cottages that dot the shoreline of our secluded little bay. I was able to paddle in silence for an hour. The sun was high in the blue sky when I started, and once I went as far as I needed to, I let my paddles rest, pulled out my phone, and took a couple of photos to celebrate the moment. I floated and rested and let the warmth of the sun sink deep into my skin, and I meditated silently for a few minutes, noticing the slightest movement of the calm water swaying my boat.

It was both a moment of happiness and awe that I was so grateful for.

  Then I turned my little yellow Pelican kayak in the direction I had come and started to paddle slowly and rhythmically back home. My cup of happiness was full.

  The next morning, I woke up to the sound of my dog beside my bed telling me the sun was up. I went downstairs with her, my other dog, and two cats, and while I let all the animals out into the back yard, I poured myself a cup of coffee and cued up a guided mindfulness meditation. I let the small herd back inside and then made my way to my comfy chair in my office to practice ten minutes of mindfulness. The meditation I listened to this day was on Headspace.com, one of my favourite mindfulness apps. I easily slipped away with the narrator’s voice as she guided me through a visualization about balance, using the visual of a blue sky as a focal point.

  This image of a blue sky is often one used in guided mindfulness meditations, and it’s a lovely image to think about. We can visualize the blue sky as something we always have access to; it’s the clear, calm, uncluttered mind, but it can be buried beneath our busy, racing thoughts, or the clouds. If we visualize clearing away the thoughts/clouds by intentionally focussing on our breath for a few minutes, the clouds gently float away to reveal the beautiful, calm, blue sky that is always somewhere in the background of our minds. The meditation suggested visualizing a photograph of a beautiful blue sky to help enhance this visualization, so I instantly visualized the beautiful blue sky I had experienced just the evening before when I was out in my kayak.

  I opened my phone and turned to the photo I had taken just twelve hours earlier, out on the water on my kayak, with the beautiful blue sky in the background.

 I knew instantly that I this photograph held so much meaning, which is why I chose it for my book cover.

Shelter from Our Secrets, Silence, and Shame: How Our Stories Can Keep Us Stuck or Set Us Free by Rebecca L. Brown, MSW, RSW

GENRE: SELF-HELP / Personal Growth / Self-Esteem                  

BLURB

As a mental health clinician, Rebecca Brown has been a safe place for many to seek shelter from their secrets, silence and shame. Inspired to finally slow down, stop running from herself and share her own story, she found ways to seek and savour her own shelter.

Rebecca’s personal journey takes us through sadness, tragedy, self-sabotage, the impossible pursuit of perfection, distorted thinking and eating, engaging with her shadow self, divorce, and numbing with alcohol, all in an attempt to avoid the story needing to be shared.

Dispelling the limiting beliefs we hold about ourselves can unlock our limitless potential to reach goals we never dared to dream. From the Boston Marathon to working with horses, Rebecca sets out to prove to herself that anything is possible when you don’t listen to the negative stories you tell yourself.

Everyone has a story. We become who we are because of what has happened to us, and because of the stories we tell ourselves. But do our stories continue to serve us well, or keep us stuck? Are our stories fact or fiction? Is it time to rewrite the versions we have been telling ourselves?

Shelter provides strategies to help reframe the thinking patterns we have developed, and offers tools to recognize when we are suffering from our own thoughts, feelings and actions. Resilience-building techniques are woven through the pages, and encouragement for the lifelong journey of collecting moments of awe and happiness.

Seeking and reading Shelter is a gift of self-compassion and self-discovery. Rebecca’s hope is that it will be read with a highlighter in hand, pages folded down, re-read, recommended to a friend, and used as a guide to start sharing our own stories with those we love.

We may not have written our beginnings, but we have the ability to write every word from this point forward and just imagine where our stories can take us when we are free of secrets, silence and shame.

EXCERPT

I give my talk.

The room erupts in applause.

A dozen people line up to thank me or say a few words at the end of my session.

One man in particular stands out.

He is well over six feet tall and wearing a full Texas sheriff uniform.

He has greying hair and is likely close to the end of his career.

He pumps my hand as he shakes it, almost leaving it numb.

He thanks me for my talk. “Great stuff,” he says.

And then he hands me his business card.

But it’s not quite a business card.

It’s a photo card, like a baseball card, or a kid’s hockey card, with the player’s name, position, and smiling face as they stand posed to take a shot in their team uniform.

Only this is of a man on a black horse.

More precisely, it’s this man, a Texas sheriff on his beautiful black police horse.

“I thought you’d like to have this,” he says. “My horse is Canadian, like you.” And then he says something that has stayed with me, because he couldn’t be more right: “Everyone in this business should have a good horse!”

He meant the business of trauma.

I couldn’t have agreed more.

I still have his “business card.”

Two years later, I went back to Texas to teach a three-day workshop on resilience to youth detention workers. I tried to look up my Texas sheriff, but he had retired. I hope he’s finding more time to enjoy his good horse. I’ve shared the story of our brief encounter and his photo card with many police officers over the years. And every one of them agrees: horses can heal humans. I’ve found shelter with horses. Sometimes in the saddle, but mostly not. My story will get there. Eventually.

I finished my keynote address and spent the rest of the day at the conference on Youth in the Justice System. People stopped me in the halls of the hotel, telling me how much they enjoyed my talk. Later that evening, I went for a run.

And then I drank a bottle of wine and went to bed.

AUTHOR Bio and Links

REBECCA BROWN is a clinical social worker with over 35 years in practice ranging from medical social work, childhood trauma, vicarious trauma for first responders, international psychological first aid, and Equine Assisted Therapy. She is honoured to hold a faculty appointment with the Department of Family Medicine at Western University in London, Ontario. She teaches extensively on the topics of trauma and resilience and has delivered keynote presentations throughout North America. She shares her life and career with her husband, a family physician and trailblazer in the field of Lifestyle Medicine. Together they live and work on the shores of the Great Lake Huron, where they seek and share shelter with their six adult children, four grandchildren, extended family and friends, two dogs, two cats and one horse.

Connect with Rebecca L. Brown

• WEBSITE https://rebeccabrown.ca/
• INSTAGRAM https://www.instagram.com/rebeccabrown.ca/
• GOODREADS https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/22150115.Rebecca_L_Brown

Get your copy of Shelter                    

• AMAZON.COM https://amzn.to/3JTnKAj
• AMAZON.CA https://amazon.ca/dp/0228859417
• INDIGO CHAPTERS https://www.chapters.indigo.ca/en-ca/books/shelter-from-our-secrets-silence/9780228859420-item.html
• BARNES & NOBLE https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/shelter-from-our-secrets-silence-and-shame-msw-rsw-brown/1140865116
• SMASHWORDS https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1125515

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