Living With Intent

Practical and accessible, Mallika Chopra offers readers a very "do-able" tool for centering and reclaiming the essence of life.

I started meditating a year ago and while I extol the many benefits this practice has afforded me, I am also familiar with Chopra's dilemma of the competing demands and expectations of modern life which threaten to overwhelm each of us and steer us away from those things which are most important to our core being. Chopra argues that the way to remain centered is through our intentions. Putting our essential needs and values out to the universe and believing that something greater than ourselves is working on our behalf (and that of all beings) is what this book helps readers to understand and practice.

She breaks the process into the acronym INTENT. A chapter is dedicated to each. I loved that each chapter ends with some ways to practice as well as a meditation practice!

After having incubated the idea of how to get more books into the hands of children and adults in my town for over a year, I finally put the idea out to some of the leaders in my community. Several embraced the idea and a year later, my small city of 25,000 has nine Little Free Library locations with more in the works as we speak! Chopra's belief that intent makes a difference is valid in my experience!

If you are looking for a way to feel less stressed and more confident that life is unfolding in a way that makes a difference for you and your world, you need to read Living With Intent. Chopra's gentle, honest, and down-to-earth guidance is invaluable!

From the Publisher . . .

“I’m trying to meditate one day but urgent thoughts keep intruding. Don’t forget to take cupcakes to school! I have to prepare for my presentation for the wellness conference! Is that lunch with the other moms tomorrow or next week? My to-do list is stampeding through my mind, trampling any chance of tranquility. I feel overwhelmed, yes, but there’s more: I feel…guilty. Guilty that I’m taking on too much, guilty that I’m not doing anything well, guilty that I’m giving short shrift to my kids, my husband, my job. And what about you, Mallika? a quiet voice asks. How are you shortchanging yourself?”

Living with Intent is a chronicle of Mallika Chopra’s search to find more meaning, joy, and balance in life. She hopes that by telling her story, she can inspire others with her own successes (and failures) as well as share some of the wisdom she has gathered from friends, experts, and family along the way— people like her dad, Deepak, as well as Eckhart Tolle, Marianne Williamson, Arianna Huffington, Andrew Weil, and Dan Siegel. She also provides a practical road map for how we can all move from thought to action to outcome. Each chapter is devoted to one step on her journey and another piece of her INTENT action plan: Incubate, Notice, Trust, Express, Nurture, and Take Action. Chopra’s insights and advice will help us all come closer to fully living the lives we truly intend.

About the Author . . .

MALLIKA CHOPRA is the successful author of two previous gift books for parents, 100 Promises to My Baby and 100 Questions from My Child. She is a busy mom of two, a successful entrepreneur, and the founder and CEO of Intent.com and Intent Blog, a social media site and its sister blog. Mallika enjoys speaking to audiences around the world at venues like TEDx, Ideacity, the California Women’s Conference, and Prevention’s R3 Summit. She has degrees from Brown University and the Kellogg School of Management.

The Future of God

The Future of God by Deepak Chopra is the voice bridging the gap for all seekers who find themselves wandering in the wilderness between the camps of raging atheism on the one hand and empty religion on the other hand--both of which fail to address the nagging sense that something of significance is missing from life.

Chopra spends ample time in the opening two-thirds of the book laying out the arguments made by modern day atheism and science regarding their belief that there can be no God. He also lays open the arguments made by religion that leave educated seekers feeling that something is missing in the dogma of the faith system in which they were raised. I can identify with both of these plights! Having been seminary trained and serving as an ordained Lutheran minister for 13+ years, I know full well the theological underpinnings of Christianity. I also personally experienced the pitfalls and short comings of Christianity's theological dogmas and practices. When I saw the many ways in which the church seemed to miss on connecting to the divine, I could no longer remain a part of it. At the same time, I was being barraged constantly by questions and arguments from both genuine seekers and atheists with their own agenda. These encounters left me an odd mix of excited, exhausted, questioning my own faith, and angry.

Thus the first two-thirds of The Future of God felt a bit slow to me, because I found my own personal issues and struggles being resurrected. It felt as though weights were attached to my feet, with more weight being added and the terrain growing muddier as I read. This was not necessarily a bad thing, however.

Because of the journey I had taken through the beginning of the book, I found myself thinking, "Yes." "YES." "YES!" as I read "Stage 3: Knowing." Reading Chopra's words, "You remember that you are the dreamer who is in charge of the dream," I recalled riding in the back seat of my parents' station wagon as a child, contemplating life and thinking to myself, "What if everything we know as 'life' is really just a dream? And what if death is simply waking up?" The fact that a man from a predominantly Hindu country, who grew up surrounded by the religious thinking and teaching of the world's main polytheistic religion should be proclaiming the truth of Oneness, God in all things, everywhere and nowhere at one and the same time strikes me as profound, authentic and true. I have long harbored the belief that God is much bigger and beyond what any one religious system can capture. Chopra says that the universal truth of God is that God cannot be put (refuses to stay put!) in a box. To this, something within me shouts "YES!" Anything other would not be divine, would not be God.

If you have questions about life's meaning; if you ponder the deeper questions of faith, meaning, purpose; if you sense there may be more to your faith you should read The Future of God. I will recommend this book to those who struggle with questions posed to them by skeptics, atheists, science, and followers of blind faith. Chopra has some answers. He opens possibilities. He restores faith and in doing so, provides hope.

Many thanks to Blogging For Books who supplied the complimentary review copy for this review. From the Publisher . . .

Can God be revived in a skeptical age? What would it take to give people a spiritual life more powerful than anything in the past? Deepak Chopra tackles these issues with eloquence and insight in this book. He proposes that God lies at the source of human awareness. Therefore, any person can find the God within that transforms everyday life.

God is in trouble. The rise of the militant atheist movement spearheaded by Richard Dawkins signifies, to many, that the deity is an outmoded myth in the modern world. Deepak Chopra passionately disagrees, seeing the present moment as the perfect time for making spirituality what it really should be: reliable knowledge about higher reality. Outlining a path to God that turns unbelief into the first step of awakening, Deepak shows us that a crisis of faith is like the fire we must pass through on the way to power, truth, and love.

“Faith must be saved for everyone’s sake,” he writes. “From faith springs a passion for the eternal, which is even stronger than love. Many of us have lost that passion or have never known it.” In any age, faith is a cry from the heart. God is the higher consciousness that responds to the cry. “By itself, faith can’t deliver God, but it does something more timely: It makes God possible.”

For three decades, Deepak Chopra has inspired millions with his profound writing and teaching. With The Future of God, he invites us on a journey of the spirit, providing a practical path to understanding God and our own place in the universe. Now, is a moment of reinvigoration, he argues. Now is moment of renewal. Now is the future.

About the Author . . .

DEEPAK CHOPRA is the author of more than fifty books translated into more than thirty-five languages—including numerous New York Times bestsellers in both the fiction and nonfiction categories. Dr. Chopra is a fellow of the American College of Physicians, a member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists, adjunct professor at the Kellogg School of Management, and a senior scientist with the Gallup Organization. He is founder and president of the Alliance for a New Humanity. Time magazine heralds Deepak Chopra as one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century and credits him as “the poet–prophet of alternative medicine.”

Tantric Coconuts

From the New York Times bestselling author of A Dog Named Christmas!
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance meets Life of Pi in this quirky spiritual journey across the wild highways and byways of America.

Free spirit Angel Two Sparrow—artist and musician extraordinaire—is having trouble making ends meet. On the verge of desperation, she inherits her crazy Aunt Lilly’s bookmobile and half-wolf named No Barks, and dreams up yet another life plan. Painting her business card on the side of the van, Angel and her trusty companion set off on a pilgrimage across America hoping to jump-start her new profession: Native American Spiritual Consultant.

Traveling in the other direction, Ted Day and his trusty Irish Terrier-mix Argo are on a much needed vacation (and in need of spiritual nourishment). When he leaves Kansas, Ted can’t image how far from his sleepy law office that old silver and black Winnebago 32RQ Chieftain will take him.

Two lives (four if you count the canines) collide (literally). Once the dust settles, Ted and Angel find themselves enamored. Sensing that something bigger and more profound has been set in motion, the couple embarks on a wild road trip, detouring into some rarely traveled corridors of the human soul. Very soon, it becomes clear that nothing will ever be the same for these travelers, their dogs, and, heck, the world at large, too.

“Coming from the author of books such as A Dog Named Christmas and Christmas with Tucker,” Kincaid writes, “This new novel might at first blush sound like a de­parture for me. And yet, Angel and Ted’s journey throughout the Southwest reveals the themes at the heart of all my work: the ultimate questions of life and love, of companionship and overcoming the odds.”

GREG KINCAID, when not writing, is a practicing lawyer, specializing in divorce and family law mediation. He lives on a farm in eastern Kansas with his wife, three horses, two dogs, and two cats.

I am thankful to Blogging for Books for providing me with a free copy of Kincaid's novel to review. This is my first experience with any of Greg Kincaid's writing, so I had no preconceived notions of what this book would be like. Being on a spiritual journey or quest myself, the description given above from the publisher was enough to get me interested in reading the book.

Tantric Coconuts reads as a didactic piece on spiritual practice and growth couched in the form of a novel. Some of the passages between Angel and Ted (and the other spiritual gurus Ted is introduced to via Angel) felt a bit like a religious studies lecture in dialogue form. Readers will get a very basic viewpoint of Christianity, Islam and Buddhism from the point of view of someone who is a peace with finding the common themes in each religion. (I happen to fall into this camp myself, and so was not offended by this. Other readers who are fundamentally attached to a specific religion's doctrine may find these discussion hard to swallow.)

Having grown up in the upper Midwest, in Lakota territory, I was trying not to read any racism or stereotyping into the author's decision to make the spiritual guru a young, Lakota woman. I suppose it was simply a choice that set the spiritual guide/teacher outside of the realm of the majority of readers' personal experience/religious system.

I found Tantric Coconuts to be a quick and easy read. I was somewhat jealous of the swiftness of Ted Day's enlightenment journey and found myself wishing it could be that way in the real world. In real life most people spend decades doing the Work and still don't end up where Day and Two Sparrow land at the end. But that is the nature of reading fiction; one must suspend reality and live in the universe as created by the author.

I do highly appreciate Kincaid's inclusion of the background texts and sources used in taking Ted Day on this spiritual quest. There are several books listed in the footnotes that I plan to investigate further on my own.

If you find yourself questioning the meaning of life or whether or not there might be more to things than the conventional teachings from your background have to offer, jump in and enjoy the ride with Angel Two Sparrow and Ted Day aboard Bertha the Bookmobile!

Seasons of the Sacred Earth: Following the Old Ways on an Enchanted Homestead

Cliff Seruntine’s book, Seasons of the Sacred Earth: Following the Old Ways on an Enchanted Homestead, is food for the soul.

My most memorable moments of feeling a connection to the sacred have been those times when I have felt most at one with nature. Although I identify myself as a Christian, I happen to believe that most differences between faiths (and people for that matter) occur because we are unwilling (perhaps at times unable) to understand or perceive the words that one faith might use could easily correspond to something within our own tradition. For example, when Seruntine uses the word “magic” what he is describing in his narrative is clearly what I have experienced as “spirit” or “immanence.”

I found the stories Seruntine shares of his family’s life on their Nova Scotia homestead endearing, moving, and powerful. His life strikes me as much more authentic than many of the people I know who like to profess their beliefs but then live in a way that seems contrary to those very values and beliefs. I applaud his willingness to share these intimate moments of deep meaning! I admit I am normally more inclined to keep my own such encounters with the sacred or other-worldly beings much more to myself. How refreshing to find someone who not only accepts these experiences as part of life, but is willing to let a world of readers in on the celebration of them!

Readers with an open mind will find it easy to connect with Seasons of the Sacred Earth no matter what faith or spiritual tradition they may identify with. I am thankful for the reminder to be more mindful, to slow my pace, to enjoy the here and now, and most importantly to be open to experiencing the gifts of spirit which surround us in this world each day.