Turbans, crystal balls, and Roma caravans. The commonplace image of the Tarot as an ancient esoteric device, tied to secret knowledge and hidden powers, is actually not so ancient. Although the Tarot has been around for nearly six hundred years, it wasn’t until the modern era that anyone claimed an occult origin for its meaning or use.
We moderns seem to like the mysterious and the occult.
Modern Tarot practitioners are used to thinking of the deck as comprising two groupings of cards: the 22-card Major Arcana (arcana means secret or hidden things) and the 56-card Minor Arcana, which is itself divided into four different suits of 14 cards each. In most modern decks, both groupings of cards are lavishly illustrated with human or animal figures, scenes, and other symbols. Nonetheless, the “Majors” tend to stand out the most. They depict archetypal and universal forms—personifications of death and renewal, of love, justice, strength, etc.—and are usually named as such, like an old-fashioned emblem book where every picture is accompanied by its title underneath.
In contrast, the “Minors” typically depict scenes from everyday life, and usually bear no titles or keywords other than a number and a suit mark: a pentacle, wand, cup, or sword.19 For most modern Tarot readers, the Major Arcana addresses the large, sweeping moments in a human life: the archetypal energies that swirl through an entire life cycle, charting the deepest patterns and mysteries of continuity and change. Most modern readers view the Minor Arcana, in contrast, on a much smaller scale. For them, the Minors address shifting and local concerns, events, challenges, and opportunities. The Major Arcana helps us understand our biggest life moments, while the Minor Arcana is more attuned to our day-to-day realities.
The terms Major Arcana and Minor Arcana are, however, relatively new inventions in the history of the Tarot deck, dating back only to the 1870 publication of The History and Practice of Magic by French occultist Jean-Baptiste Pitois (aka Paul Christian). The Tarot itself harkens back centuries earlier to Renaissance Italy, and for most of its history there was nothing “arcane” about its cards or its imagery. The method of Mindful Tarot works to regain this original sense of immediacy and clarity. From a Mindful Tarot perspective, the focus on what is “occult” or “secret” only leads us away from our embodied reality, inviting us to seek purported truths that are remote and inaccessible. Instead, Mindful Tarot invites a practice rich in lived and intuitive understanding.
Moreover, if the notion of “arcana” is misleading, so is the distinction between “Major” and “Minor.” The four “Minor” suits will prove to be key in our practice of Mindful Tarot. The four suits will be more influential in some ways than the so-called Majors. A mindful understanding of the four suits—Pentacles, Wands, Cups, and Swords—will ultimately provide us with a unifying perspective on the Tarot system as a whole, helping to anchor us in a complete practice of ease, abundance, and love.
The Only Thing That Works
I was born in Boston, and every summer as a kid I visited an ice cream parlor named the Four Seas. I had no idea why the owners chose that name. The store was half a mile from the seashore, on a quaint stretch of Main Street in an old Cape Cod town, and had a venerable history dating back to the 1930s, when an enterprising confectioner turned a vacant blacksmith shop into one of the region’s first “dairy bars.” The Four Seas was open only during the summer months, and both the name of the parlor and its dozens of incredible flavors—black raspberry, fresh peach, rum and butter, peppermint stick—were synonymous for me with summertime, with childhood, with sunburns and vacation. Years later I learned that the shop had been named for the four bodies of water abutting the Cape to the east, west, north, and south—and for the region’s past days of seafaring glory. “We face four seas … / And o’er them forth to foreign climes / Have sailed good men and true.” 20 Like Cape Cod, the Four Seas ice cream parlor defined itself as a world apart—an island unto itself.
But is it even possible to live a world apart—an island unto oneself?
Over the past few chapters I’ve been arguing for an approach to life moored in the mindful awareness of present moment experience. I’ve been suggesting that a life of ease, abundance, and joy is already ours—readily available when we recognize the simple truth of deep interconnection. As the poet John Donne argued four centuries ago, “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” 21 Nothing exists in isolation, and nothing is too small to escape our care. We’re all part of this earth. We’re all part of “the main.”
Nonetheless, we humans continually imagine ourselves facing four seas—cut off from the world around us, from the “foreign climes” of other beings, things, and places. We imagine ourselves alone and self-enclosed. Great seas seem to divide our separate worlds. But then, in our loneliness, we spend our entire lives trying to cross these seas of separation. We wonder how we can remain safe and solitary—and then we wonder how we can connect with others. How do we sail these contradictions?
In some sense this is a question of appropriate boundaries. We often think that having good boundaries simply means being able to close the metaphorical door behind us and defend our space. Indeed, if the 2000s were about “the power of now,” the 2010s have been about “the power of NO.” In the past decade, the subtle art of saying no has become a central trope in self-help circles.22 But actually, good boundaries have less to do with saying no and more to do with cultivating the right conditions for saying yes. Good boundaries enable sharing and connecting. Life requires individuation, the development of a distinct and separate sphere of growth and development. But life also withers from too much enclosure and isolation. It’s like a sapling trying to grow in a forest. Without enough space, light, nourishing earth, and water, the tree will never grow. But planted alone, in the middle of a vast and empty expanse, the sapling will also falter. Life requires intimacy and integration as much as distinction and separation. The good boundary is the fluid boundary. The good boundary is a threshold rather than a wall.
There’s a poem by the medieval Sufi poet Rumi that I often share with my clients and mindfulness students: 23
The Guest House
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
As an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
Being human requires good thresholds rather than solid walls. Our “visitors” are not just messengers from the outside world, like people, mosquitoes, or the evening news. Our visitors are ultimately what’s already in us: our own sensations, emotions, and thoughts. We encounter an ever-changing guest list of pleasure and pain, of joy and sorrow. “Every morning, a new arrival,” Rumi tells us. Being human means endlessly entertaining a world of experience. And, for better or worse, this world keeps changing. Nothing lasts forever, because we face neither four seas nor four walls. We face open doors, vistas, and windows. We can neither definitively shut out what is unwelcome nor decisively retain what we love best. This being human is a guest house.
The world permeates us—suffuses us and infuses us, like water through a tea bag. The truth of our being human, of human beings, is the truth of our permeability. Our lives are ventilated and porous. And so we might as well turn toward the transoms and thresholds of our lives, acknowledging even the unwelcome visitor as if they were an honored guest.
My students encounter Rumi’s truth most directly when confronting physical pain. I remember a mindfulness student I’ll call B. who suffered from trigeminal neuralgia (TN) and experienced often crippling jolts of pain on the right side of his face, from his cheek down through his jaw. He said that an attack of TN felt like stabbing shards of glass. One day he interrupted a discussion about boundaries and thresholds with a stern look on his face. “The only thing that works for my pain,” he declared, “is to ignore it. Why would I want to bring awareness to the right side of my face? That’s just inviting the neuralgia!”
“Ignoring and distracting are great ways to cope with pain,” I agreed.
“Yeah, when they work!” B. countered. I sensed his mounting frustration.
I probed the matter further, as gently as I could: “So, shutting the pain out hasn’t solved the problem?”
“Shutting the pain out is the only thing that works.” B.’s voice was decisive. The words were almost capitalized when he said “The Only Thing That Works.” It was like he was reciting the title of a movie or play: The Only Thing That Works. His pain was an old, old story. He’d been grappling with it for years, and it was clear that I just didn’t get it.
We mindfulness folk are stubborn, though—and we Tarot folk are even worse. I kept at the inquiry, as gently as possible.
“What might it look like not to shut things out?” I was hoping to convince B. to greet the pain, just a little, at the threshold of his awareness. I was hoping B. would be willing to turn, gingerly and gently, toward the part of his experience that had become forbidden territory. “Could you tentatively dip a toe, as it were, into the water?” I asked. “Maybe, just tentatively, allow yourself to notice the pain?”
Therapists who practice a form of mindfulness called somatic experiencing talk about this kind of toe dipping. They call it pendulating. Like a pendulum swinging back and forth, we gently dip into, then dip out of, painful or distressing experiences.
But B. just shrugged and frowned.
Later that week, he emailed me, thanking me for my time. He was letting me know that he would be dropping the class. “Mindfulness sounds great. But it’s just not for people like me.”
About a year later, another student of mine shared a different experience in class. A chronic migraine sufferer, he too experienced frequent attacks of facial pain. When our conversation turned to Rumi, J. brought up his headaches. “I need to bring awareness to my migraines. I need to ‘greet them,’ like that poem says. I don’t have to like them, but if I ignore them, it’s like a whole continent of my world is erased. My headaches are a big part of me; they can’t simply be off-limits.”
“Well, if it really worked to ignore them, you could banish them forever,” I said. “Problem solved.”
“Yeah,” said J. “But it never really works. And anyway, I don’t want the limitation. The pain is one thing. But the fear … the fear is what’s really crippling.”
Over the years that I’ve brought mindfulness to my students and to my Tarot readings, I keep finding myself returning to J.’s insight. The fear is what’s really crippling. The fear is what keeps us holding “foreign climes” at a distance. The fear is what keeps us facing four seas—alone and isolated, imperiled and threatened.
A famous book in the 1970s taught that love is letting go of fear. 24 Wouldn’t it be nice if it were that easy! Wouldn’t it be nice if we could just let go of fear: the fear that perhaps keeps us safe but also cuts us off. The fear that turns us into islands unto ourselves—independent strongholds, fortressed against all things, buttressed and alone. But there’s a mountain of evidence in evolutionary biology, neuroscience, psychology, and related fields that reveals just how deeply ingrained our fear is. Stress reactions, deep aversions, unhealthy cravings: we push and pull our world relentlessly in search of safety and advantage.25 We can’t simply let go of fear any more than we can simply let go of our most deeply rooted survival instincts.
Instead of letting go, however, we can work with these ingrained patterns. We can train ourselves, first and foremost, simply to acknowledge what feels deeply rooted and indelibly ingrained. Over time, rather than face four seas of isolation, we can learn to face our pain and fear, turning toward a world of open doors and breezy windows. We can learn to face what scares us, leaning into a complex world. We can, in other words, learn to befriend our world—and to befriend ourselves.
Indeed, there’s a concrete set of teachings that can help us practice our way out of fear. Although contemporary mindfulness is not strictly Buddhist in its framework, it does draw on East and South Asian teachings about the mind and heart. Over the years I’ve found a particular set of ancient Asian teachings to be especially helpful in overcoming fear. Traditionally these teachings are categorized as the Four Boundless Abodes. An abode is a dwelling place, like a house (e.g., Rumi’s “guest house”) or a home. In the context of the ancient teachings, these “homes” are really frames of mind, or points of view. The teachings invite us to inhabit, as it were, four different perspectives on life. To be more precise, each of these perspectives challenges our tendency to separate and isolate ourselves from the rest of the universe.
For instance, the teaching of the First Abode invites us to adopt an attitude of friendliness toward our experiences—like the speaker in Rumi’s poem: “This being human is a guest house. / Every morning a new arrival. [ … ] / Welcome and entertain them all!”
The Second Abode invites an attitude of compassionate response. When we adopt the perspective of the Second Abode, we strive to become aware of forms of suffering in the world—and to provide healing and solace where we can.
The Third Abode counterbalances this awareness of suffering with a cheerful appreciation of the beauty, flourishing, and perfection all around us.
Finally, the Fourth Abode invites a broad gaze and a calm heart, asking us to adopt a wide-angle lens on life—an even-keeled perspective where we simultaneously acknowledge pain and wholeness, suffering and perfection.
In four complementary and interwoven ways, each of these four frames of mind challenges our inclination to carve the world into discrete and sequestered islands. The Boundless Abodes remind us that no man is an island.
Traditionally, the Four Abodes carry names in Pali or Sanskrit—the ancient languages of India—and over the centuries these names have been translated and explained in a variety of ways. Over the course of my work with the Tarot, I’ve realized that the lessons of the abodes can best be captured with four simple English words: care, compassion, cheer, and calm. These four terms are my “Four Cs”: the antidote to the four seas that isolate us like separate islands. And, fascinatingly, they correspond to the progression of imagery we find in each of the four “minor” Tarot suits.
Dropping Anchor
As I’ve said, contemporary mindfulness doesn’t require a Buddhist framework. Mindful awareness simply requires a willingness to “drop anchor” and consider the full extent of the present moment. Indeed, dropping anchor is the very first mindfulness practice I teach my clients and students. (You will learn this practice later in this chapter.)
Although a Buddhist perspective isn’t necessary for this practice, some of Buddhism’s most ancient teachings can help clarify the work. In his very first sermon 2,500 years ago, Siddhartha Gautama—the historical Buddha—put together two ideas that offered a revolutionary approach to life.
On the one hand, the Buddha argued that the source of our dissatisfaction with life (i.e., that dukkha that I discussed in Chapter 1) is our deep craving for what brings pleasure. We want what we want—and boy, do we want it! We want to hold on to it forever, to buy it in bulk from Costco, to fill the bathtub with it and bathe in it! Inevitably, however, nothing gives us pleasure forever. Things get used up, things die, things drift away and disappear. Even our own delight comes to an end at some point. Don’t you sometimes find that you actually can have too much of a good thing? Just talk to me after I scarf down that extra-large plate of nachos with all the fixings!
Our pursuit of pleasure inevitably brings sadness and displeasure with it. That’s the first thing that the Buddha taught. He taught that ultimately pleasure can’t really please us.
But the truly remarkable part of his teaching came next. Siddhartha also taught that we shouldn’t avoid pleasure. He taught that sadness comes not just from our cravings and attachments but also from our aversions. Trying to avoid things, including the things we crave, makes us just as unhappy as clinging does. Unhappiness comes just as much from pushing the world away as it does from pulling the world in tight.
Whether we try to pin things down in a death grip of desire or push things permanently away with the heave-ho of hate, we inevitably fail. Everything changes. Life is about movement. We can’t freeze things forever, according to our desire or disgust. The world just keeps on turning. And yet, according to the Buddha’s diagnosis of the human condition, this effort to freeze the world is precisely what we undertake with every living breath.
I mean this literally: we humans tend to equate controlling our breath with controlling the world. It’s as if we think we can stop time just by stopping our respiration. Of course, the movement of our breath, in and out, is perhaps our deepest, most embodied experience of time itself. Through the rising and falling of breath, we experience the ebb and flow, the flux and movement, of life as a whole. Thus, we tend to hold our breath when we’re mad or frustrated, and when we were young we may have even tried to get our way with the same tactic: “I’ll hold my breath till I turn blue!” Now, as grown-ups, we often caution others that the future won’t unfold as they desire: “I wouldn’t hold my breath if I were you!”
We even bring this tactic to our technology. Many of us hold our breath when checking email or while waiting for a website to load. Scientists call this phenomenon email apnea. In the supercharged world of digital tech, 53 percent of websites are abandoned if they take longer than three seconds to load.26 For many of us, waiting those few extra milliseconds has become so painful that holding our breath is our unconscious coping strategy. It’s as if we believe we could make our CPUs spin faster through sheer respiratory force of will.
Now, the anatomical truth is that, ultimately, we cannot consciously control our respiration. Of course, we can partially control it. We can hold our breath for a while (until the buildup of carbon dioxide makes us, despite ourselves, gasp for oxygen), and we can inhale more deeply or frequently at will (until hyperventilation knocks us out). But the brain stem, that most ancient and reptilian part of our nervous system, ultimately does the breathing for us, whether we want to breathe or not. We can consciously pull air into our lungs, and we can consciously push air out of our lungs. But in the end, our breath has a will of its own, and it will ultimately resist us. As long as we live, we will breathe precisely when we have to.
Indeed, this is the big lesson that our breath has to teach us.
On the most fundamental level of experience, breathing illustrates the futility of our efforts to push and pull our life. Pushing the breath out, pulling the breath in, holding the breath still: in our aversion and our craving, we continually try to push the world around. As Siddhartha Gautama taught 2,500 years ago, our pushiness is the source of our suffering.
The mere act of breathing demonstrates the truths of the Buddha’s first sermon. Indeed, that’s why the Buddha’s earliest followers practiced a form of meditation called anapanasati: mindfulness (sati) of the outgoing (ana) and incoming (apana) breath. In order to remember Siddhartha’s teaching, they practiced mindfulness of in-breath and out-breath. Today, countless non-Buddhists also practice a version of this meditation as a way to bring ease in the midst of life’s ups and downs.
My “Dropping Anchor” meditation is an awareness-of-breath exercise of this sort. This meditation encourages us to sense into our breath, wherever we feel it most vividly in the body. For some, the breath will be most vibrant in the movement of the chest and the upper torso, as the ribcage expands on the in-breath and slightly collapses on the out-breath. For others, the breath will be most noticeable in the sensations at the tip of the nose—as cool, dry air enters the nostrils on the inhalation and as moister, warmer breath exits on the exhalation. And for some, the breath may be vivid elsewhere in the body: for instance, in the rising and falling of the lower belly, or even as sensations of greater and lesser density in the chest cavity. But it can also be quite hard to feel the breath. The patterns of rising (in-breath) and falling (out-breath) can be surprisingly subtle. If that’s the case, softly placing the right hand on the heart and the left hand on the belly can help. Our palms may be able to feel the movements of ribcage and diaphragm.
Awareness-of-breath meditation can provide a simple embodied understanding of the flux and exchange at the center of life. It can also provide a centering point in the midst of that flux. As I often say in my guided meditations, the sensation of the breath rising and falling can feel a bit like the surging and subsiding of the ocean. Like a ship dropping its anchor, we can find a sense of stillness in the midst of life’s roiling tides. We can learn to ride life’s waves, allowing our attention to settle on the ebb and flow of respiration—just as a moored ship rises and falls in place, the ocean waves undulating beneath. By resting our awareness on the surging and subsiding of our own breath, we learn to find our own safe harbor, quietly riding with the surf while life flows around us.
Care to take ten or twenty minutes right now to drop anchor with me?
Check out the “Dropping Anchor” mp3 file on my website: https://www.calyxcontemplative.com/mindful-tarot-practice.
If you’re like me, as soon as you instructed yourself to bring awareness to your breath, that puppy I mentioned in chapter 2 was off and running. Or maybe it just keeled over and fell asleep. (Bouncing-off-the-walls restlessness and sleep-of-the-dead drowsiness seem to be the two complementary sides of the same puppy-mind.) Remember what meditation expert Jack Kornfield wrote? Meditation is like training a puppy. If you’re new to meditation and your puppy-mind was instantly darting about or falling asleep, you may well have felt some discouragement. Isn’t meditation supposed to be about emptying the mind and feeling total peace?
Hmm. Nice thought. Wouldn’t it be great if it worked that way?
Mindfulness practice is not concentration practice. We’re not trying to get the mind to clamp down and hold still. That would be another effort in futility, like trying to hold our breath until this carousel world stops spinning. Evolution crafted us with an agile, wriggly mind. It’s natural for the mind to keep moving, to keep exploring the corners and angles of our environment, to keep wandering hither and yon in pursuit of better turf. Indeed, our minds are just like everything else in this world: they are all about flux, movement, dynamic exchange.
For this reason, instead of striving to focus, clamp down, and concentrate, mindfulness practice is about gently returning, again and again, to our anchor point. It’s not about stopping the spinning carousel of our mind or our world. Instead, mindfulness practice is about finding the hub at the center of the spinning wheel. This “hub” is our anchor point: the stillness that comes when we no longer push or pull the world but simply hunker down and pay attention in the midst of life’s ups and downs. Mindfulness practice is about getting more and more comfortable at riding the waves in a sea of change.
And a strange thing begins to happen as we build capacity and become more and more mindful. The puppy actually does stop some of its wriggling. The restlessness and drowsiness start to clear, like smoke clearing from a room. The world’s waves of change seem less tumultuous somehow. The inner topography of our mind and heart seems softened. What used to feel like jagged mountain peaks and sharp ravines now perhaps seems more like ancient rounded hills and gentle dales. The terrain and seascape that used to challenge us now perhaps feels somehow generous, wise, and sacred. The world that we used to push and pull, that used to bring us pleasure tinged with pain, now opens up within us like our oldest guide and friend. Like ourselves.
This is the world that the Tarot will help us explore.
From Four Seas to Four Cs
It’s a chilly spring morning as I write these words, sitting on a stone terrace on the Greek island of Ikaria, overlooking a rugged hilltop of coarse green grasses, purple thistles, dusky cacti, and red poppies. I can hear wild turkeys chortling and the distant bells of goats clambering up the steeper, rockier portions of the mountain. The Aegean Sea opens up below me, slate gray in the chill and filtered spring light. The thrumming buzz of bees—everywhere bees—surrounds me. The magical trip of a lifetime brought me to Greece, for a month, to write. A free plane ticket and three hundred euros allowed me to rent this little cottage and granted me this precious time
I have time to dwell here. It is time to dwell here.
And so I sit and write, filled by this place with its light and wind and sounds, allowing the landscape to seep into me and shape me. Encountering the Tarot mindfully provides a similar adventure. Each of the four suits presents a seascape and a terrain that can help shape our hearts and minds. We can traverse its land, sail its seas, widen out through its horizons. Like my time in Greece, dwelling in the landscape of Tarot can help reframe my point of view.
Kornfield says, In training the mind, or the puppy, we have to start over and over again. Learning to drop anchor is a necessary first step for all explorers. But it can be so hard. We tune in to the sensation of the breath, feeling the chest fill and empty, expand and contract … and then we’re thinking about breakfast. Did we remember to pay that bill? There’s that leaky faucet again—got to fix it. And, ugh, what are we going to do about that irritating coworker/neighbor/friend?
Kornfield’s puppy metaphor reminds us how hard it can be simply to start over and over again. We drop anchor and immediately start to drift away. For this reason, ancient meditation instructions also provide a discussion of four attitudes of heart and mind: the Boundless Abodes I briefly described earlier in this chapter.27 These attitudes are mindsets, frames of mind, that we can consciously adopt. They’re like filters we toggle on, and through which we consider our experience. They function like corrective lenses—like eyeglasses designed to help correct our nearsighted hearts. We may get frustrated with our puppy-mind, but puppies respond only to gentle persistence. The more we try to tug and push our mind into behaving, the more it tends to squirm and wriggle. The Four Boundless Abodes are the corrective lenses that, over time, help us see how to be kind and compassionate toward our own wriggly self.
Taken together, the Boundless Abodes comprise a full teaching about love. As the nineteenth-century poet and visionary William Blake put it, “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.” 28 The Four Abodes are called “boundless” because they require expanding our hearts and minds toward the infinite. They invite us to consider the world with a fresh perspective: to encounter a world without limits, by means of a heart and mind that is equally limitless. They map out the essential qualities of an expansive, generous life.
As I mentioned before, we can characterize these four complementary mindsets in terms of four qualities that begin with the letter C:
• Care: An attitude of turning toward and paying attention
• Compassion: An attitude of responding
• Cheer: An attitude of thankful joy
• Calm: An attitude of balance and equanimity
The Four Cs build on one another, each one embodying a different aspect of an interconnected life. Taken together, as the scaffolding upon which we build a life of abundance and ease, these Four Cs help us navigate our separate seas of isolation and fear. And we can begin simply enough. We can begin cultivating these four attitudes just by asking questions. The more audacious the questions, the better.
I’m a big fan of hypothetical questions. What-ifs allow us to consider all manner of possibilities and opportunities. I still remember the best bumper sticker I ever saw: “What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it’s all about?” Learning to dwell in the land of the abundant and loving heart may require some pretty audacious hypotheticals.
• What if I greeted every moment with care and friendliness?
• What if I responded to the pain of others as if it were my own?
• What if I took cheer and found joy in each precious moment?
• What if I calmly accepted the good with the bad?
What if this one precious life of mine were fully revealed in its infinite beauty and bounty?
Ultimately, each abode offers a landscape for the heart, a terrain for the mind. As we encounter our own puppy-mind, the more we meditate and reflect upon that landscape, the more easily we may find ourselves dwelling there.
And, over time, we may find that the puppy will train itself.
19. Throughout I’ll use the Waite-Smith designations for the four suits, although historical decks and many modern decks use different terminology.
20. The four bodies of water surrounding the Cape are the Atlantic Ocean, Nantucket Sound, Buzzards Bay, and Cape Cod Bay. Centerville, MA, resident Mabel E. Phinney wrote the poem (“Cape Cod Calls”) that gave the parlor its name.
21. John Donne, “No Man Is an Island,” Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, 1624.
22. Eckhart Tolle’s famous The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment was first published in 1997 and hit the bestseller list in 2000 after Oprah Winfrey recommended it. James and Claudia Azula Altucher’s The Power of No: Because One Little Word Can Bring Health, Abundance, and Happiness was published in 2014.
23. In The Essential Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks.
24. Gerald G. Jampolsky’s Love Is Letting Go of Fear was first published in 1979 and has sold millions of copies and been reprinted three times since then.
25. A recent book that explores the research on these topics in clear and accessible terms is Robert Wright’s Why Buddhism Is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment.
26. Data cited in Daniel An, “Find Out How You Stack Up to New Industry Benchmarks for Mobile Page Speed,” February 2018, https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-resources/data-measurement/mobile-page-speed-new-industry-benchmarks/.
27. Traditional teachings within Theravada Buddhism actually identify forty different meditation objects—forty different ways to frame our meditation. Anapanasati (awareness of breath) is one of these. The Four Abodes are also included in this list.
28. Blake, “A Memorable Fancy,” The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.