Chop Wood, Carry Water: A Guide to Finding Spiritual Fulfillment in Everyday Life

An inspirational handbook to discovering spiritual fulfillment in everyday activities and applying ancient wisdom to your modern life.

More than a thousand years ago a Chinese Zen Master wrote:
Magical Power, Marvelous Action!
Chopping Wood, Carrying Water...

The message is as true today as it was then: the greatest lessons and the profoundest heights of the spiritual path can be found in our everyday lives. It is the greatest challenge for people living in contemporary society to find the spiritual aspects of working in an office, store, or factory; balancing a checkbook; raising a family; or making a relationship work. How can we make all these daily activities a part of the path? How can we apply the insights of great spiritual traditions, and our own experience, to the way we live and develop?

This book is a guide—a handbook filled with information, advice, hints, stories, inspiration, encouragement, connections, warning, and cautions, for the inner journey as we live throughout our lives.

Chop Wood, Carry Water contains much ancient wisdom, but the emphasis is on contemporary perceptions. Many of our guides have been known to humanity for millennia: they are the world’s great spiritual teachers—Christ, the Buddha, Loa Tse, Confucius. Others are contemporary teacher and healers, widely recognized and respected. All offer ways to integrate the events, our focus on relationships and family, our struggle with technology, money, politics and more—into the quest for spiritual fulfillment.

Rick Fields is editor in chief of Yoga Journal, author of The Code of the Warrior and How the Swans Came to the Lake: A Narrative History of Buddhism in America, and coauthor of Chop Wood, Carry Water and The Turquoise Bee.