Awakening to the Sacred: Creating a Spiritual Life from Scratch

A beautifully written, simple guide to creating a spiritual life from scratch and connecting with the sacred in everyday life.

All of us long to connect with something greater than ourselves, to experience the sacred in our daily lives, and to enhance our sense of spiritual enlightenment--yet often we don't know where to begin. Awakening to the Sacred is an extraordinary new book that provides seekers of all faiths with the tools and practices they need to build a spiritual life from the ground up and to cultivate a divine presence in everyday life.

In this elegant, inspiring book, Lama Surya Das--the most highly trained American lama in the Tibetan tradition and author of the bestselling Awakening the Buddha Within--integrates essential Buddhist practices with a variety of other spiritual philosophies and wisdom traditions to show you how to create a personalized spiritual practice based on your own individual beliefs, aspirations, and needs. Through reflections on his own life quest, thoughtful essays, and entertaining stories, Surya Das examines the common themes at the heart of any spiritual path, including faith, doubt, love, compassion, creativity, self-inquiry, and transformation. He then explores prayer, yoga, chanting, guided meditations, breathing exercises, and myriad other rituals, providing practical examples of each that we can use day-to-day to nurture our inner spirit.

Surya Das's unique and accessible approach emphasizes that we are all, by nature, spiritual beings and that our lives are naturally filled with sacred moments.  Awakening to the Sacred illuminates the natural meditations already present in daily life and shows how we can use them to awaken our hearts and minds and progress toward inner peace, happiness, and enlightenment.

Lama Surya Das has spent thirty years studying with the great spiritual masters of Asia, including the Dalai Lama, and is a leading spokesperson for the emerging American Buddhism and contemporary spirituality. He is a poet, translator, and full-time spiritual teacher who leads lectures, workshops, and meditation retreats worldwide. He is the author of three books, including the national bestseller Awakening the Buddha Within, is active in interfaith dialogue, and has been featured in numerous publications including New Age Journal, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, and Tricycle. He lives outside Boston, Massachusetts.