Doorway Into Life: Trading the System for the Way
by Kay Williams
review by Lundy
What if you could step out of the mad race that modern life has become? What if you could stop pursuing “success” and status and wealth? What if you could find an entirely different way of living, one that’s already available to you right now? What if this way of living would do far more than current life does to meet your deep longings?
Kay Williams, a woman I’ve known and admired for several years, answers these profound questions in her recent book, Doorway Into Life: Trading the System for the Way. This is one of the wisest and most insightful books I’ve read.
Williams is a survivor of domestic tyranny herself, and that experience certainly led to many aspects of her current understandings. But this isn’t a book about a survivor’s experience. Williams is writing about what has gone wrong in the world we live in, and how we could go about setting it right.
She writes with extraordinary clarity and brilliance, and with poetry. This is an amazing and super-important book. I’ve never seen anyone explain,so elegantly and in so few words. the essence of what’s gone wrong with modern living
As William eloquently explains, a tyrant in the home creates the same traps on the private level that a competitive, money-hungry society creates on a mass scale. Life turns into a power struggle, with the greediest and most violent ending up with the most power. From the time we’re young, we get sucked into “the System,” which she calls “Dollarocracy,” which gets us focused on:
* accumulating money and possessions
* competing with others, living in a world of winners and losers
* getting ahead
* gaining power
And what are the results when a society lives with these focal points?
– Nature gets destroyed.
– Women and children are made second-class.
– Mothers are intimidated and dominated.
– Children are raised with abuse, domination, and silencing.
In elegant, caring, and inspiring language, Kay Williams shows us why we’ve gotten so addicted to this system, both individually and as a society, and how we can find our way out.
Williams is currently putting the finishing touches on a game that will accompany the book, through which groups of people can practice applying the principles that she’s teaching. The game is called “The Game of Exchange.” The game involves strategizing to get free from “Dollarocracy” and moving into living a new way. The new way is about building homes, communities, and societies that work for everyone, instead of only working for a few “winners” at the top of the pile.
The book — and soon the game — will teach you:
* how to create environments where family members experience true safety
* how to build structures so that people have plenty of privacy, but also have plenty of companionship and intimacy when they want it
* how to move from punishment and rejection to healing and repair, bringing about a dramatic re-visioning of how adults interact with children
* how to make sure that children really get heard, especially when they are attempting to let you know that they’ve been harmed
Williams invites us to begin by reshaping how we relate to each other in our homes. And that begins with reshaping how we think about providing guidance to children. As she says, “Some people consider the discipline of children to be the act of rendering them obedient to command.” (I might go so far as to say most people think this way, at least in modern times.) She then demonstrates what the focus on obedience leads to: children (and then adults) who are focused on doing what will win them approval – and freedom from punishment – rather than focusing on doing what’s right to do.
She then takes the reader step-by-step through how to create an environment that is about mutual respect, connection, privacy, and responsiveness, instead of being about obedience, punishment, and abandonment of oneself.
From this foundation in the family, Doorway Into Life then helps us to grow a healthy society. It guides us through rethinking what justice means, and friendship, and marriage. All of these core pillars of life need to be reevaluated and rebuilt, with a focus on creating whole people whose deep needs are being met. And from there we take the last leap to building a loving and safe world, in keeping with our true nature as human animals and spiritual beings.
Along the way, you’ll learn where addiction comes from and how it works, and how to escape from it. The alternative to addiction turns out to be a life where our profound longings are understood, attended to, and satisfied; not covered up with short-term addictive replacements like power, money, or junk food, none of which could every actually make us feel complete.
Doorway Into Life will speak to you regardless of your particular spiritual or religious beliefs, or even if you don’t consider yourself a spiritual person; you could even choose to think in terms of what Williams calls “universal basic aliveness” if the word “God” doesn’t work for you.
Kay Williams is a philosopher — well, to me she is, though she might not use that term — and a poetic writer of profound truths. You could read a few pages a day of her book and use it as a devotional in that way. She is truly offering us a Doorway Into Life. Why not at least peak through the opening? You might decide to walk through it, and find the beauty that waits on the other side.
In fact, I’d say that everyone living in the modern world needs to read this.
