In 2010, Sandra A. Miller began hunting for a chest of gold coins buried in New York City soil. In her late forties at the time, she was mired in the process of helping her ailing mother to die, her teenage children to fly, and her writing career to survive the beating it had taken in the Great Recession and beyond. Soon enough, Sandra realized she was not just hunting for a treasure chest full of gold, but rather a different kind of riches. She had lost herself and needed to find a spiritual path that would lead her back home.
I wrote
Trove: A Woman's Search for Truth and Buried Treasure
Many years ago, I read Paolo Coehlo’s The Alchemist in one afternoon, then I set it down in a daze, feeling like I had been transported, maybe even transformed by Coehlo’s parable about Santiago, a young Andalusian boy searching for hidden treasure. The story has a seductive, timeless quality that helped ignite my quest to live a spiritually rich and adventurous life. No spoiler alerts here, but reading this book is a reminder of the power of honoring the “soul of the world” when on any search, but especially one for life’s greatest riches. My favorite takeaway line: When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.
A global phenomenon, The Alchemist has been read and loved by over 62 million readers, topping bestseller lists in 74 countries worldwide. Now this magical fable is beautifully repackaged in an edition that lovers of Paulo Coelho will want to treasure forever.
Every few decades a book is published that changes the lives of its readers forever. This is such a book - a beautiful parable about learning to listen to your heart, read the omens strewn along life's path and, above all, follow your dreams.
Santiago, a young shepherd living in the hills of Andalucia, feels that there is…
Oneness by Rasha is one of those books that appears when you are ready for it. I’ve recommended it to people who say they don’t get it. And I’ve gifted copies to friends who later ask, “How did you know I needed to read that?” Rasha created her book by channeling the spirit of Oneness, so take that that however you want. I regularly re-read my dogeared copy like a sacred text that reminds me to energetically align with Source as a path to realizing my own limitless potential. If you’re feeling earthbound these days, and want a path to other realms, this could be it. The line that I repeat like a mantra: You are a spark of divinity in the throes of activation.
Every now and then a book comes along that is so powerful that words cannot describe the experience people start having when they read it. These rare, life-changing books always seem to show up at the perfect moment in time, exactly when we all need it the most. Oneness is such a book--one that will change your life.
In February 1998, Rasha began a profound dialogue with the universal Presence, "Oneness"--the Divinity we all share. Word for word, she transcribed the principles for a new understanding of the mystery we call "life." These teachings empower us to take a quantum…
When I teach creative nonfiction writing, I tell my students that the more personal you can make your story, the more deeply readers will connect with it. Broad generalizations just won’t do. Devotion by Dani Shapiro is one of those intimate, inward-looking memoirs that opens the reader to her own journey, even if that journey is completely unlike Shapiro’s own quest. In Devotion, Shapiro is struggling to help her infant son who has a life-threatening illness, while simultaneously undertaking a search for what she believes, for her faith. Her prose is lyrical. Her insights wash over you like ancient truths. By the end of the book, you will feel entertained, but also enlightened.
“Devotion’s biggest triumph is its voice: funny and unpretentious, concrete and earthy—appealing to skeptics and believers alike. This is a gripping, beautiful story.” — Jennifer Egan, author of The Keep
“I was immensely moved by this elegant book.” — Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love
Dani Shapiro, the acclaimed author of the novel Black and White and the bestselling memoir Slow Motion, is back with Devotion: a searching and timeless new memoir that examines the fundamental questions that wake women in the middle of the night, and grapples with the ways faith, prayer, and devotion affect everyday life. Devotion…
The Untethered Soul: the journey beyond yourself, by Michael A. Singer is my go-to book for getting out of my head and opening up inner space. The spare prose and wise insights work on the reader in profound ways, helping to calm inner chatter and offer a path of peace. My copy of The Untethered Soul is annotated and underlined, because no book has been so singularly helpful in pointing me toward freedom from my own self-imposed suffering, especially in times of high stress.
Who are you? When you start to explore this question, you find out how elusive it really is. Are you a physical body? A collection of experiences and memories? A partner to relationships? Each time you consider aspects of yourself, you realize that there is much more to you than any of these can define. In this book, spiritual teacher Michael Singer explores the question of who we are and arrives at the conclusion that our identity is to be found in our consciousness, the fact of our ability to observe ourselves and the world around us. By tapping into…
The comparative mythologist, Joseph Campbell is probably best known for A Hero with a Thousand Faces, but it’s another book—Pathways to Bliss—that I turn to like a travel guide to my own spiritual journey. In prompting readers to explore archetypes to help them create their personal mythology, Campbell believes that life should be a journey to finding our bliss. This is a book about personal growth for people who want to self-discovery in a larger—mythical—context.
Joseph Campbell famously defined myth as “other people's religion.” But he also said that one of the basic functions of myth is to help each individual through the journey of life, providing a sort of travel guide or map to reach fulfillment — or, as he called it, bliss. For Campbell, many of the world's most powerful myths support the individual's heroic path toward bliss.
In Pathways to Bliss, Campbell examines this personal, psychological side of myth. Like his classic best-selling books Myths to Live By and The Power of Myth, Pathways to Bliss draws from Campbell's popular lectures and…
Trove is the story of a wife, mother, and writer whose life is upended when she begins an armchair treasure hunta search for $10,000 worth of gold coins buried in New York City, of all places with a man who, as she points out, is not her husband. In this eloquent, hilarious, multi-award-winning memoir, Sandra A. Miller grapples with the regret and confusion that so often accompanies middle age, and the shame of craving something more when she has so much already.
In a very real way, Miller has spent her life hunting for buried treasure. As a child, she trained herself to find things: dropped hair clips, shiny bits of broken glass, discarded lighters. Looking to escape from her volatile parents and often unhappy childhood, Miller found deeper meaning, and a good deal of hope, in each of these objects. Now an adult and facing the loss of her last living parent her mother who is at once cold, difficult, and wildly funny Miller finds herself, as she so often did as a little girl, pressed against a wall of her own longing. Her search for gold, which soon becomes an obsession, forces her to dredge up painful pieces of her past, confront the true source of her sorrow, and finally discover what it is she has been looking for all these years.
I’m an OB/GYN, passionate about adventuring beyond what’s expected. This has led me to pivot multiple times in my career, now focusing on writing. I’ve written a play, The Post-Roe Monologues, to elevate women’s stories. I cherish the curiosity that drives outer and inner exploration, and I love memoirs that skillfully weave the two. The books on this list feature extraordinary women who took risks, left comfort and safety, and battled vulnerability to step into the unknown. These authors moved beyond the stories they’d believed about themselves–or that others told about them. They invite you to think about living fuller and bigger lives.
Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.
The team attempts a new route up the East Face without the use of supplemental oxygen, Sherpa support, or chance for rescue. When three climbers disappear during their summit attempt, Zieman reaches the knife edge of her limits and digs deeply to fight for the climbers’ lives and to find her voice.
The plan was outrageous: A small team of four climbers would attempt a new route on the East Face of Mt. Everest, considered the most remote and dangerous side of the mountain, which had only been successfully climbed once before. Unlike the first large team, Mimi Zieman and her team would climb without using supplemental oxygen or porter support. While the unpredictable weather and high altitude of 29,035 feet make climbing Everest perilous in any condition, attempting a new route, with no idea of what obstacles lay ahead, was especially audacious. Team members were expected to push themselves to their…
