Mind on Fire author Philip Muls shares candidly about addiction and recovery.
Philip Muls is an executive in a global corporation. He has extensive world travel and spent many of those years as a functioning alcoholic. Muls book, Mind on Fire, was written to compel those struggling with addiction to reclaim their lives. The candid approach in this book is designed to help the reader to face him or her self. In a series of conversations between Muls and his psychiatrist a pathway of healing is set forth. In a very personal interview, Muls shares his thoughts on the journey in Mind on Fire.
- How will your book change a reader’s life?
It is brutally honest and will confront the reader potentially with some ugly truths about his or her own life. It will bring a longing for a more authentic and spiritual way of being.
- Name solutions that your book provides.
The book teaches how living in the now can help with recovery. Accepting imperfection and bringing a second perspective (watching the thinker) is very helpful in the recovery process. Living intuitively instead of purely on emotions is a key to success. The book also discusses other world perspectives. It would be helpful to be open to them.
- What writers are similar to yours in the marketplace?
Dr Irvin Yalom is the biggest inspiration. Michael Singer. Eckhart Tolle.
- What makes your book better than those in the marketplace?
Mind on Fire is very authentic. I have lived these events and that is pure and brutal. The path for recovery is not for the faint hearted or to those who wish to maintain excuses. The level of vulnerability in my biography goes far beyond normal writing in that I allowed my psychiatrist to have a major role in the development of the book.
- How have your life experiences impacted what you wrote?
I never could have written this book without living the last 10 years first, in hell, and then slowly ascending.
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Share your favorite excerpt from the book.
The story Lovesick typifies me. It has a pre-drinking innocence that I’ve craved so much. I have a strong longing to be young again. That melancholy typifies the book throughout.
LOVESICK
BY PETER BAER
A week after my sixteenth birthday, I am sitting in a classroom with twenty-two other boys, pretending to listen to a Latin teacher. Our minds are everywhere but here.
I for one cannot stop thinking about Conny. She is the reason for the lovesick state I have been in for weeks now. She is the epitome of perfection to the sixteen-year-old me. She has hazel eyes and a classic face of beauty. She is wearing a navy school dress accentuating her figure. For a moment, it makes me wonder whether the school has intended this effect when making girls wear a uniform. With her hair in a boy cut, she is simply irresistible.
I do not fight it. I am powerless. I recognize a higher force. She walks with an air of carefree confidence, seemingly unaware of what she does to boys and men. With hindsight, that was a pretty naive thought on my part. I know by now that she was aware of her powers. Pretending she wasn’t just made it perfect. It started with a smile.
Dexys Midnight Runners are playing their signature song, “Come on, Eileen,” as a backdrop to the epic scene that follows. I watch Conny walking toward me along with two other girls, all wearing winter jackets, woolen mittens, and hats. She looks like an angel. She is laughing out loud because of something her friend said. Her gaze crosses mine, and it seems that her smile is now directed straight at me. She simply says, “Hi, don’t you just love this song?” That’s it. That is all that happens. I am in awe.
Awe is called the eleventh emotion, beyond the basic ten known by science. Awe plays on the boundary between pleasure and fear, inspired by great beauty or mystery. It causes us to completely forget ourselves in a moment of great wonder, feeling the presence of something greater.
Yes, right on the mark. I am in awe. And I am not equipped to deal with it. I manage to say a profound, “Hi, yes I do,” back at her, and she gives me a coy glance that will stay with me forever.
A few days later, I ask her out in a burst of supreme confidence. She hesitates for a brief moment. That moment lingers on in my eternity. It is a moment in which all is still possible, and yet you feel that it is not you but fate that will prevail. She says, “No.”
Later in life, I learned how to see rejection as a useful step in the pursuit of victory. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger and all that. But back then it took me apart.
When it comes to drama, there’s nothing quite like unrequited love. For weeks, I did not sleep or eat. It seemed to me that the meaning of life had been found and instantly lost again. If rejection hurts, rejection without a reason is a killer. It tortured me in the most intense way that she denied me that one date. To my endless frustration, guys who were not paralyzed by her loveliness did manage to go out with her. And they did it in a casual way, nothing to it.
That was a lesson in love right there. She needed a cool guy, a guy she had to fight for.
Why did I not know that? Why was this universal truth about the female longing not genetically pre-arranged in my moves? Why did all the males who preceded me let me go empty-handed into an unfair fight?
Thinking back on it so many years later, it makes me wonder. Why was I in awe looking at her, but not when I looked at other girls who were even more beautiful? Why did her smile hold that much power over me, like I felt her sweet innocence was out of this world and I had to pursue her with everything I had? Why did I feel that something of existential importance had just slipped through my fingers?
Exquisitely painful as it was, I wouldn’t want to have missed it. This first love, which did not go beyond “Hi,” and yet took on legendary proportions in my memory, inspired me to look for experiences that brought me the same feeling of bewilderment and wonder.
But somehow, I never quite reached the same high-octane level in my emotional fuel and probably never will. By design it seems . . . you can be truly lovesick only once.
About the Author
Philip Muls is a senior business executive in a global corporation, who has been traveling on the job through Asia for the last twenty-plus years. He holds an MBA from Leuven University and has been granted various sales and management awards in the software industry. After quitting alcohol in his mid-forties, Philip started to research and experiment with a variety of recovery treatments on the level of mind and body and also on the level of his deeper self. This book blends his amazing travel stories with an authentic account of how alcohol affects the brain and how recovery from addiction can be like navigating a minefield of existential fears and obsolete beliefs. When he is not off traveling in China or India, Philip lives with his wife Natja and his two children Monika and Alexander in Grimbergen, Belgium. Mind on Fire is available on Amazon or where ever books are sold. He can also be reached at his website www.philipmulsauthor.com. He can also be reached at his website www.philipmulsauthor.com.