The author
Jasen Rockliffe
Jasen Rockliffe wrote Back. To you. from a hospital bed in Oakville, Ontario. The preface is dated from the room he was in: Room 344, ICU.
Most books are written to be understood.
This one was written to be felt.
Why this book exists
You did everything right. And something still feels off.
Not broken. Not tragic. Just distant. You are good at your life and slightly outside it.
I know that room. I lived in it for years and called it being busy.
That ache is not damage. It is the equipment still working. Something in you has been reporting honestly the whole time. You have just been hard to hear.
You will want to argue with that. Most people do. It sounds like the thing a book says to warm you up before it sells you a system.
So here is the whole of it. Fourteen practices. None of them takes longer than ten minutes. Nothing to keep up with, and nothing to be behind on.
The workbooks for all of them are on this site. Twenty printable sheets, free, no email, nothing to type.
Presence is not stillness. It is precision.Chapter eight
The gap between what happens and what you do is about one second wide, and that second is where a life gets decided.
My mother is eighty-nine. She has had dementia for fifteen years. It took her memories. It never took her laugh.
I watched her lose almost everything a person is supposed to be made of. The thing underneath stayed exactly where it was.
That is the argument of this book. I did not invent it. I stopped being too busy to notice it.
The book is dedicated to her. The name on the cover is the one she gave me.
Jay
What the book is
Fifteen chapters across five acts, for people who are functioning, succeeding on paper even, and still hear something quiet asking for their attention. Each of the first fourteen chapters closes with a practice called a Way Back: small, concrete, under ten minutes, free of jargon.
It is not a system and it makes no promises. It tells a true story, then hands you one thing you can do today. The claims underneath the practices are set out honestly on the science page, including the seven of seventeen that the evidence only weakly supports, and the three that argue against things the wellness industry sells.
Where the money goes
The book pays its own bills, and not one dollar more. Everything after that goes to dementia and Alzheimer’s research, with receipts posted on this site every year, where anyone can read them.
The first printing is five hundred hardcovers, numbered by hand and registered to the name of the person who keeps each one.
Read something first
All fourteen practices are free here, in the book’s own words, with no account and no email.
Way Back No. 1, sixty seconds, the one the book opens with.
The Hold, which keeps a grievance for a day and then asks one question.
The Sit, ten minutes, held for you.
The workbooks, twenty sheets you can print.
Contact
Press, rights and anything else: book@defusely.com. He reads it himself.