Conscious Reading: Book Recommendations
I believe books have as much capacity to aid our growth as personal experience! During my time of travel, after long days of hiking, I often read in hammocks strung between two trees. I listened to audiobooks while I drove. Sometimes I picked a scenic spot and dedicated the day to reading and rest. The books were often my companions at night, as I snuggled up in my sleeping bag and flooded the tent with light from my headlamp. In each of these contexts, their content helped me make sense of my own experience. Somehow, I always ended up with the right book at the right time.
If one of these titles stands out, trust that it also has a teaching for you!
Without further ado, these are my top recommendations:
1. The Prophet - Khalil Gibran
I discovered this book in the apartment I was renting in Barcelona. It became the gem I took with me to Mont-Juic, as I sat in the grass watching gondolas pass and people come and go. I scribbled much of its text into my journal as I made sense of what’s truly important in life.
2. Meditations - Marcus Aurelius
While society has changed, along with trends and fashions, the fundamental human experience has remained the same. If you’ve ever felt alone with your thoughts and crave reassurance that people have wondered about the same things, were tormented by the same thoughts, and asked the same fundamental questions about life for thousands of years - this book will be a source of great comfort.
In my experience this text deserves time. I read small chunks at a time and took time to process and internalize the content. It can require some perseverance to figure out how to stick with it (it took me several failed attempts), but I promise it is worth the effort.
It helped me to read two versions side by side - an original translation and a more modernized version (both found online). I felt that the modern version’s sentiment was a bit off from the original text at times, but I still found it useful as a starting point to build on.
I am beyond grateful that I found a way to make this book work, it contains so many valuable insights.
3. The Art of Communicating - Thich Nhat Hanh
Thich Nhat Hanh is one of my favorite teachers. He has helped me gain a deeper understanding of mindfulness. In this book he explores the essence of communication - to understand and to be understood. It is as important to create space to listen to ourselves as it is to create space to listen to others. We can only hear, understand, and love others to the extent that we hear, understand, and love ourselves. Understanding forms the basis for compassion, acceptance, and healing.
4. The Gifts of Imperfection - Brene Brown
I am a big fan of Brene Brown’s work. I have read and loved The Gifts of Imperfection, Daring Greatly, and her audible lecture series The Power of Vulnerability. She sheds light on important concepts like guilt, shame, numbing, and perfectionism.
She shares guideposts for wholehearted living and how to navigate the pitfalls that prevent us from experiencing and appreciating our own lives fully.
5. Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself - Joe Dispenza
Years ago on a podcast, I heard Dr. Gabor Mate say the following: “childhood experiences are often the sources of subconscious thought patterns. For example, as a kid I understood that I would be loved on the condition that I behave myself, that love is conditional. Today, as an adult, am I really going to live my life based on beliefs that a 3 year old thought about life on a bad day?”
This question really struck a chord with me. My beliefs were so deeply embedded in my subconscious that I didn’t even know what they were. So much of my journey over the past few years has been to understand and reshape the long forgotten beliefs that not only filtered my experience of life but also drove my response to it.
Breaking the habit of being yourself is a book about this process.
It explores the relationship between thoughts and emotions, and the way our beliefs function as filters on the experiences we have. It advocates for the importance of deliberately choosing our beliefs, and the difficult but worthwhile road to overwriting the default ones we have accumulated and accepted without considering their objective truth.
Aspects of the book were a little out there for me, but I found the majority was very useful. I believe it is our responsibility as readers to choose what aspects of someone’s work we embrace and what aspects we acknowledge without adopting.
6. East of Eden - John Steinbeck
If you’ve been looking for a work of fiction that is brilliantly written and lets you get lost in a different world, this is an amazing book. I first read it in high school and was just as captivated by it again as an adult. The capacity to be good or bad is within us all, it is our choice what we let ourselves become.