Mountains in the Mind
This is one of the most powerful books I have read this year. In his foreword, the explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes, himself an individual who takes great risks and attempt great endeavours, speaks of the need that some people how to test themselves and draw on their inner reserves of strength. He wisely remarks that the point and challenge of the book is 'to make the connections yourself between where you are now on where you could be.' The meaning of Fall is both literal and metaphorical in this book. Karen Darke explains the meaning as 'something that happens to us that we find challenging to deal with.' Psychologically, this is one of the lessons of the near death experience. More about the meaning of the fall below (Interestingly, the author does not connect it with the biblical fall or with the Platonic idea of a fall into ignorance and forgetfulness with which her notion would be more congruent.)

There are three falls in the book, each with a different meaning. The first is her own at the age of 21, when she was studying geology at Aberdeen University. She undertakes too ambitious a climb and loses her grip. She later realises that she failed to listen to the distress signals of her body, pushing herself beyond her physical limits. As a result, she is paralysed from the waist down. The second fall happens to her friend Will. He is killed. The third is another friend Scott, whose fall she witnesses but he walks away unhurt. The period between the first two falls is one of the most difficult. Having been used to a resilient and strong body, Karen finds herself imprisoned in a form over which she has little control, realising that, like all of us, she had entirely taken for granted the freedom to move. The one consolation is that she shares this experience with others in a similar or worse situation than herself. It calls to mind a quotation from Larry Dossey's books reviewed elsewhere in this issue that 'things were so bad one had to laugh!'

Karen describes the effect of Will's death and that of pulling her attention away from feeling powerless in her new circumstances 'to looking at what I could do, and how I could make the most of the new situation, rather than dwelling on a past that was no more.' This gives her an essential insight, namely that is only possible to live in the now: 'something about Will dying forced me to find a new strength derived from a sense that my surviving had purpose.' The tragedy of his death spurs her into new activity, making her value life and giving her the courage to engage with it wholeheartedly again.

Back out of doors in the mountains again, Karen witnesses Scott's fall and fears the worst. However, Scott emerges practically unscathed: 'one slip, one small moment, and he was neither dead nor paralysed.' This makes her ponder deeply about destiny, fate and luck, wondering who controls this play that is our lives. She reflects that 'I was happy for him. I was sad for myself. I was sadder for Will.' This incident triggers a deeper search for meaning, one that reaches an acceptance of mystery by the end of the book. It also helps her examine more deeply her own patterns since even after she emerges from hospital, she sets herself difficult physical challenges like competing in the London Marathon and crossing high plains in Kyrgystan in a wheelchair. Here she has the happy realisation that paralysis had not excluded her from the wilderness, and that the only threat to her freedom had been in her mind.

A new theme now emerges in the book, that of spiritual exploration and self-discovery. It begins with an encounter with a woman called Leemac, who is able to tell how much gold is in each of some 30 Bolivian rock samples. This leads to a small experiment in which she fills five jars with sand and hides a gold ring in one of them. Leemac is able to tell every time which jar contains the ring. This phenomenon rattles the scientific framework which Karen has come to accept as a result of her education. A tension emerges between her intuitive sense and her rational framework, which will be familiar to many readers. This is intensified by her experiences in Brazil and Maui where she encounters some extraordinary healing phenomena, even if the results of her own interventions are not as successful as she might have hoped.

She realises in retrospect that the mental, emotional and spiritual shifts are more important than any physical outcome. The teaching is 'to have love, patience and faith and to remember to have love in your heart.' Few could disagree with this. The process also unblocks her emotions, making her realise that her show of strength was simply an ego trip. Reflecting 10 years later on her experience and its aftermath, she returns to those unexpected events that can constitute a fall, commenting that 'whatever transpires, we have the power to choose what to make of it. We can choose to turn our situation into a positive life experience. Or we can get stuck and experience suffering.' Victor Frankl arrived at a similar conclusion in Auschwitz, and indeed Karen quotes the same passage from Nietzsche (she misattributes it to Camus) that 'whatever does not kill me, makes the stronger.'

She concludes that there is a gift in the fall, in that hidden resources are shocked into action and we are forced to confront something within ourselves. For her, 'the only way to live is to grasp the opportunity that hides in times of difficulty.' The book finishes by invoking a summer kayak trip in Canada, where Karen once again demonstrates her sense of adventure. As other commentators have noted, the book records the triumph of the human spirit over adversity. I should add that it is vividly, even brilliantly written, and that the reader is wholly caught up in the narrative. Returning to the remark I quoted from Sir Ranulph Fiennes at the beginning of this review, this is a book that encourages the reader to ask if they could do more, and live more intensely. It also relates the personal with the universal, based as it is on a number of inspiring quotations about human condition. Karen now runs a small enterprise coaching others to make the most of life in overcoming challenges, and a charity to develop inclusive outdoor activities - see www.inspireandimpact.com and www.interventure.co.uk)