The Book of Soul: 52 Paths to Living What Matters

St. Martin's Essentials, May 2020
and as an audiobook from Macmillan Audio, May 2020

Availble on Amazon

AUDIO PROJECT DESCRIPTION

Beloved as a poet, teacher, and storyteller, Mark Nepo, the New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Awakening, has been called "one of the finest spiritual guides of our time," "a consummate storyteller," and "an eloquent spiritual teacher." His many audiobooks have been translated into more than twenty languages.  His latest audiobook, The Book of Soul, explores our struggle to inhabit the soul on Earth through a messy human life, and how underneath our differences, we can be who we are everywhere and create a path to what matters.

After being born physically, we unfold within a second womb, meant to incubate our better angel.  The second womb is an experiential one that, through the labor of a lifetime, births the soul on Earth.  This book delves into that process of transformation in its mystery, difficulty, and inevitability.  It is designed to be entered a chapter each week over the course of a year, so you can weave your inner reflection into your days, letting one inform the other.

Our journey from innocence to experience is how we emerge from the second womb.  The sections of this book mark the passages we all face in moving through this experiential unfolding: enduring our walk in the world, until we discover our true inheritance, which lets us live in the open by widening our circle, until we help each other stay awake.

About the book, Mark says, "It seems the purpose of suffering is to exhaust us of our differences, and the purpose of love is to awaken us to how we're at heart the same.  Then, we discover that the temple is the world.  Still, every life, every generation, every age takes its turn at pushing each other away, only to be loved and worn back to the one tribe we belong to.  This seems even more relevant in our tense, modern world.  For there is no they.  We are they.  We are each other.  And there's a Unity that always waits below our righteousness and insistence that we know the way."