Book Review - Shots from the Hip
Author: Daniel Reid
Category: Autobiography
Quiver Score: 4.5/5
In the fields of Taoism, herbalism, and Chinese culture, Daniel Reid is a legendary author who has written books that have changed the course of lives. I know firsthand, as The Tao of Health, Sex, and Longevity changed mine and was likely the first book I ever read about Taoism and Chinese medicine.
His most recent publication is a two-book memoir entitled Shots from the Hip, a colourful account of his many exotic adventures in Asia, including his encounters with the long lost traditional opium culture of China, which he approaches, like all things Chinese, from a connoisseur's perspective.
To begin, Reid has lived a life like few others, and book one of his autobiography, subtitled Sex, Drugs, and the Tao (SDT), is one of the most entertaining books I have ever read, hands down, full stop. From his childhood in Africa to his jet set teen years as an airline brat, drugs, travel, and eventually sex were as commonplace in his life as breathing. When he went to his first lecture on Chinese culture at UC Berkley, the lecture that shook him to the core and sent him headlong into the East, he was tripping on a seismic dose of LSD. Before visiting his first brothel in Bombay, he savored his initial taste of real opium in one of the city’s underground opium dens.
The high velocity, your-fucking-kidding-me pace of SDT is enough reason to indulge in this pleasure ride that recounts, seemingly impossibly, only one man’s early life escapades. But within is also a cornucopia of life lessons from Reid’s “follow your bliss” attitude that led him from one jaw-dropping opportunity to another. And, SDT serves as a rocket ship that launches the reader into the otherworldly realms of consciousness explored in book two. “As the train chugged into the station,” Reid concludes SDT, “I stirred three drops of Lady Sky Dancer [LSD] into my morning coffee to savour the shift my gears were making to a slower, quieter way of life and to open my mind to a finer field of energy and light in the luminous space…”
In Energy, Light, and Luminous Space (ELLS), the subtitle for book two, Reid covers midlife to present day and demonstrates powerful lessons from teachings such as Taoism, Buddhism, and the spirit world. Drugs still exist in ELLS, to be sure, but Reid honours the sacredness of plants as medicine – for the body, mind, and spirit – while also pushing the boundaries with an opium compulsion that threatened to overshadow his luminosity by cornering him into his first of three near-death experiences.
Reid’s journeys with Ayahuasca, Taoist sexual practices, and Chinese herbal medicine all helped to inform his writing and ultimately what would become his cleansing protocol that he and his clairvoyant wife JoJo would use to help heal innumerable people through their signature detox program. I first experienced a taste of this protocol through the aforementioned The Tao of Health, Sex, and Longevity that I had picked up at a cleansing retreat in Thailand in my early twenties while doing a weeklong cleanse with coffee colonics. It turns out JoJo had helped to establish the protocol at this centre and Reid’s book helped to popularize coffee colonics around the world.
The slightly tempered pace of ELLS came as a relief because the page-turning power of book one was placing me at risk of ignoring important fatherly duties, such as being a father. As I sank into ELLS, I came up for air more often and reflected on my own life through the filter of Reid’s experiences. Would I have made different choices based on the lens he was now giving me to see through? Perhaps, but I sit where I am today writing these words because of the Buddhist concept of the “Wheel of Life”: each action builds on the one before it, rolls into the one after it, and continues right on into the next life.
Shots from the Hip is a profoundly intimate look into the life of a renegade Taoist scholar who recognizes that “life deals us a hand of cards at birth, and the best we can do is play them for all they’re worth.” If we measure life by impact, Reid’s gambles have paid off as he has helped countless cash in on the benefits of cleansing their body to restore health and to strive for more virtuous living.
“Death is the last chapter in this life, but the story continues in the next,” writes Reid. “…The light never dies…We are each the central character in all of our life stories, as well the sole author. What happens next is entirely up to you. Only you can write the script, and only you can change it. There are no ghostwriters to write it for you, and no gods to make amendments.”
Listen to Dan Reid in episodes 25 and 34 on Salish Wolf Podcast.
