Be Present

I have so much to catch you up on. In the last month, I went from no interest in spirituality to joining a book club, practicing meditation and visiting a Tibetan Buddhist monastery. How did I get here?

My troubles have always led me to faith in the past. This is not surprising. I've had a lot of troubles in the past year, so I began reading books on self-improvement and meditation.

One day, I got an email about a new book club in my neighborhood focusing specifically on books about personal improvement and spirituality. Those were exactly the types of books I was reading at the time, so I joined.

We had our inaugural meeting a month ago and I joined the most interesting group of ragtag misfits - a Tarot reader and consultant, an Orthodox Christian high school English teacher, an elderly retired philosophy teacher, a young Christian woman close to my age, and a young man highly interested in "energy" as it is depicted in The Celestine Prophecy. We each brought a book near and dear to our hearts to share who we are with the group. My book? The life-changing A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis, of course.

At the end of the meeting, the Schoolteacher, who organized the group in the first place, chose our first book: Letting Go of the Person You Used to Be by Lama Surya Das. I read and really enjoyed it. More on that later.