Awakened Living: Book Launch
As I started working on my new book, Awakened Living, I noticed that it was the right time. This book focuses on how inner trauma and pain translate into outer hate and chaos, and how to break the vicious cycle and embrace compassion for the differences that make us stronger and more resilient. We need to examine these tendencies toward racism and hate now more than ever, given the social and political climate, including what is happening with DACA, healthcare, and climate change with three hurricanes in the Atlantic ocean. The consequences of our actions are never far behind us, and as I’ve said before, and written extensively about, what we do to the planet, we do to ourselves.
The poems in this book also delve into societal contradictions and hypocrisies, elucidating how we often don’t do what we say. The spaces between thoughts, speech, and action can be fraught with tension due to fear, insecurity, lack of self-confidence, peer pressure, and other forces. As a result, we are unhappy. It doesn’t help that we are often bombarded with advertising campaigns that tell us what drugs to take, what to eat, wear, drive, and do. These messages prey on our subconscious insecurities, often holding us back from being our true selves.
In such conditions, we pursue the “perfect” body, job, and life, often falling short of these unrealistic standards and beating ourselves up about not being good enough. In reality, self-worth has a lot more to do with purpose and service, and a lot less to do with money or status. This book examines the constants we all face: life, death, love, and change, exploring pathways for accepting life as it is, and choosing how we take care of our bodies, our hearts, our actions, our integrity, and our precious dreams.
Awakened Living: Transforming Trauma and Embracing Compassionate Change will appeal to anyone who has faced hardship and wants to heal the self as a way to help heal the world. Let me know what you think of these verses.
Awakened Living contains inspiration about how to live with integrity and courage in a traumatic time.