SOL—Supportive Guidance for Healing & Awakening is a self-help book divided into insightful parts that guide readers through understanding their divine nature, introduce daily practices for spiritual and personal development, and emphasize the importance of community in one’s healing journey. Why was this an important book for you to write?

This book was important for me to write because it speaks directly to my lived experience. 

When my spiritual awakening intensified in 2018, I felt like I was losing control of my life. The physical, mental, and emotional agony was so intense at times, I didn’t think I could make it through. I found myself becoming extremely anxious, depressed, scared, and hopeless.

In my darkest moments, grace came to me. Sometimes grace came as a feeling of relief or comfort, seemingly from nowhere. Other times, grace came in the form of spiritual insights. These insights revealed deep truths about our divine nature, the importance of mindfulness, the nature of time, the roles of fear and ego, and how we heal through our hearts. Another form grace took was guidance, e.g. guidance on certain breathing methods to use, meditation styles to try, mantras to practice. 

These gifts of grace helped me navigate the most grueling stretches of the awakening process. They also provided me with confidence and practical tools I could use to overcome my suffering. I began writing down these gifts of grace and incorporating them into my life through daily practice.

In 2023, I began gathering those gifts of grace into a book, and in 2024, I published that book, which I call SOL: supportive guidance for healing and awakening. Through SOL, I share the wisdom, practices, tools, and inspiring messages that have served me best on my path of healing and awakening. That way, readers can benefit from the gifts of grace I received, and they can not only endure the spiritual awakening process – they can flourish in the experience!  

What were some ideas that were important for you to share in this book?

The first idea I wanted to share is that everyone and everything is divine. We tend to think that we and the rest of the universe are something less than the divine. Spiritual wisdom revealed to me, time and again, that God is everything, without exception, and that our physical bodies only seem less-than-divine because our minds project a sense of unworthiness or inadequacy onto the universe. I want readers to embrace their divinity and to gradually undo the mental conditioning that leads us to believe otherwise.

I also wanted to convey the importance and beauty of our human hearts. Through our hearts, we are capable of bottomless courage and mercy, and this combination of courage and mercy is what allows us to both progress on the awakening path and to be good to ourselves on that path. This balance of striving-and-soothing has proved to be pivotal for me as I navigate the unpredictable swings of the awakening process. 

In addition to being our trusty guide on the difficult awakening path, the heart is also the source of our deepest healing. The heart is a melting pot that welcomes in our karma – our unresolved feelings about the past – and reintegrates that energy into our beings, restoring us to the state of wholeness we knew before trauma. Our society puts such an emphasis on the head and the gut; we fetishize being smart and being decisive. When we lose ourselves in our heads and guts, we lose our connection with our hearts, and this keeps us stuck in vicious cycles of suffering and mistreatment that can last entire lifetimes. By reconnecting with the heart, by softening our hearts to our difficult feelings, and my remaining mindfully present as those difficult feelings resolve in time, we heal even the gnarliest unresolved feelings, and we rediscover the wholeness and fulfillment that we’d always sensed was possible, but which always seemed so far away. Alas, the path to fulfillment has been beating in our chests all along! It just takes awareness, focus, and trust to reestablish that heart connection and let the healing happen.

The third idea I wanted to share is that we’re not alone. I see so many people struggling with pain and darkness in our world. In the depths of that struggle, we can feel so lonely and isolated, it feels like we’re going it alone. I wrote this book to help folks realize that they’re not alone, that there are helpful tools and resources for navigating inner difficulties, and that there are global and local communities devoted to helping people heal and reconnect with the beauty of life. 

With so much helpful information in this book, have you considered writing a companion workbook or journal that readers can use alongside this one? 

I love this idea!

What is one thing that you hope readers take away from SOL – Supportive Guidance for Healing & Awakening?

I hope readers take away from SOL that they are the inspiring warmth of their own hearts. When we believe it’s our job to fix ourselves or to fix the world, we go down a hopeless, sometimes destructive path. When we try to fix ourselves or others, what we’re really doing is projecting our insecurities onto something. Our insecurities lie deep within us, in the bottomless depths of our hearts-and-souls. When we abide in mindful presence in the heart, we transform the heart into a place of healing. We are like the flame that lights the heart-candle’s wick! By sustaining this heart connection, we resolve our insecurities and the negative beliefs underlying them. We become like the shepherd calling the lost sheep home from the wilderness. This deep inner healing is what brings peace, goodness, and gladness into our world. We look upon the world and realize – oh my, there was never anything out there to fix! There was just pain deep within me that was looking for a safe place to surrender. Our hearts are that safe place of surrender, that all-welcoming sanctuary where even the deepest pain can find resolution and peace. By being gently with our hearts as our hearts feel those difficult feelings, we empower our hearts to heal the wounds of the past, which frees us to live more capably and confidently in the here-and-now!

Author Links: GoodReads | Website 

Original source: https://literarytitan.com/2024/09/18/gifts-of-grace/