Five books that changed my life in 2022 (non-fiction) 📚 ✨

This year, I'd like to say, I got back to reading. Have you felt like you've been buying books and then not being able to get time to read. I've been feeling that way for the past two years or more! I did two things this time - started traveling with a book every time (especially on all my budget flights through Asia where we have no screens, no distractions!) and also did a spring cleaning of books I'd bought on a whim or had read already and did not need them crowding my personal space.

🚦 Greenlights by Matthew McConaughey

🙌🏼 Summary:
Greenlights is an unconvential memoir - playful, adventurous and coming from over 35 years of keeping journals! “Greenlights”  refers to moments when the universe gives us permission to do new things; reds and yellows are the things that stand in our way. Every opportunity, success, strife can be turned into a Greenlight if persist, pivot or pause.

🎨 What drew me to this:
I was always a fan of Matthew McConaughey and I was super interested to see what he wanted to talk about and his life journey. The fact that he believes in journaling, reflections, signs and his story-telling & delivery - I drew so much inspiration. I highly recommend to buy the audiobook - it's worth every cent! I got a sign to read this book - and that was the biggest green light. 💚

🏆 A few memorable lines:
~ I never wrote things down to remember; I always wrote things down so I could forget.

~I have a lot of proof that the world is conspiring to make me happy.

~ The problems we face today eventually turn into blessings in the rearview mirror of life. In time, yesterday’s red light leads us to a greenlight. All destruction eventually leads to construction, all death eventually leads to birth, all pain eventually leads to pleasure. In this life or the next, what goes down will come up. It’s a matter of how we see the challenge in front of us and how we engage with it. Persist, pivot, or concede. It’s up to us, our choice every time.

🖖🏼 Many Lives, Many Masters by Brian Weiss

🙌🏼 Summary:
Many Lives, Many Masters dwells with the career of Dr Brian Weiss while he conducts therapy sessions with Catherine, a patient with symptoms of fear and anxiety. After putting Catherine under trance with hypnotic regression to find the source of her trauma, she gains access to past-life experiences and discovers wisdom from the spiritual world, including insights passed down from spiritual beings called Masters. A natural skeptic at the beginning of the book, Weiss becomes an enthusiastic spiritual practitioner and believer in intuitive knowledge by the end. It is written as a dramatic thriller and you feel like you're in the room with Brian Weiss as this happens.

🎨 What drew me to this:
I got into this book thanks to a video from Oprah that appeared on my YouTube feed. I was intrigued. Then I went through a few more interviews of Dr Brian Weiss talking about the soul and the journey of a soul. What was interesting was how someone who is an academic and a non-believer in spirituality was experiencing something through a patient and that completely changes his point of view and trajectory. Even if you don't believe in the contents of the book - it's an interesting premise and something worth reflecting on.

🏆 A few memorable lines:
~Patience and timing … everything comes when it must come. A life cannot be rushed, cannot be worked on a schedule as so many people want it to be. We must accept what comes to us at a given time, and not ask for more.

~Happiness is really rooted in simplicity. The tendency to excessiveness in thought and action diminishes happiness.

🍃 Synchronicity by Carl Jung

🙌🏼 Summary: Carl Jung's Synchronicity is an essay about those moments when everything just seems to come together. Carl Jung defines synchronicity as "the coincidence in time of two or more causally unrelated events which have the same meaning". It is a cluster of meaningful patterns that normal cause and effect has not caused.

🎨 What drew me to this:
I was drawn to this book purely because how I was seeing coincidences happen in my life. Then I was researching on Manifestations and came across this CIA document on the Gateway process; which essentially validates manifestation and how to manifest. That brought me to Carl Jung and how tackles this subject.

🏆 A few memorable lines:
~Synchronicity is an ever present reality for those who have eyes to see

~Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.

~Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.

⚛️ Stalking the Wild Pendulum by Itzhak Bentov

🙌🏼 Summary:
In his exciting and original view of the universe, Itzhak Bentov has provided a new perspective on human consciousness and its limitless possibilities. Widely known and loved for his delightful humor and imagination, Bentov explains the familiar world of phenomena with perceptions that are as lucid as they are thrilling. He gives us a provocative picture of ourselves in an expanded, conscious, holistic universe.

🎨 What drew me to this:
I have been reading about sound and frequency & vibrations. I have been recently trained as a Sound Bowl practitioner and still very new to the subject. For Bentov, everything comes down to frequency. Get the right frequency and you entrain with the cosmos. Your energy can travel around the world seven times a second.
His own model of the Universe (even designed after a jelly doughnut) complete with Black Holes, White Holes, Matter, an Axis of Time, Light Escapement, the Universal Mind Hologram, Expansion and Informational Fields of Energy. There is discussions on Relative Realities, Levels of Evolution and Consciousness Hierarchies; exploring new age ideas suggesting Poltergeists, ESP, Psychokinesis, Psychic Healing and other phenomena, Telepathy, and Mystical experiences! There is so much to unpack and even just consider as a hypothesis. I do not have a science background yet I really appreciated how he writes this and makes it very relatable to all.

🏆 A few memorable lines:
If everything were ironclad, all the rules absolute and everything structured so no paradox or irony existed, you couldn't move. One could say that man sneaks through the crack where paradox exists. So, here we are - all part of this great hologram called Creation, which is everybody else's SELF.

🌈 The Radiance Sutras by Dr Lorin Roche

🙌🏼 Summary:
The Radiance Sutras is inspired by the Sanskrit text Vijnana Bhairava Tantra and is a classic meditation text that describes 112 doorways for entering divine awareness right here in the midst of everyday life. Dr Lorin Roche (who is also one of my teachers of Instinctive meditation) uses his language and skill to share a conversation between Shiva and Shakti, where each conversation can be it's own meditation.

🎨 What drew me to this:
I first discovered this book during my Yoga Teacher Training back in 2020 during the pandemic and then I've been very lucky to be in the Meditation Teacher training program with Dr Lorin Roche. I open this book and let the sutra that I land on guide me! I use it as an inspiration for almost all my meditations on YouTube.

🏆 A few memorable lines:

This is my favorite Sutra from the book - Sutra No. 26 :-)

There is a place in the heart where everything meets.
Go there if you want to find me.
Mind, senses, soul, eternity – all are here.
Are you here?

Enter the bowl of vastness that is the heart.
Listen to the song that is always resonating.
Give yourself to it with total abandon,
Quiet ecstasy is here.
And a steady, regal sense
Of resting in a perfect spot.
You who are the embodiment of blessing,
Once you know the way.
The nature of attention will call you to return,
Again and again, answer the call
And be saturated with knowing,
“I belong here, I am at home here.”

— From sutra 26 of The Radiance Sutras