HUFFINGTON
02.23.14
THRIVE
maybe choosing some sort of god or
spiritual-type thing to worship—be
it JC or Allah, be it Yahweh or the
Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the
Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles—is
that pretty much anything else you
worship will eat you alive.”
We now know through the latest scientific findings that if we
lead the lives we want (as opposed
to the lives we’ve settled for) without learning to go inward.
My goal is for this book to chart
another way forward—a way
available to all of us right now,
wherever we find ourselves. A
way based on the timeless truth
that life is shaped from the inside
out—a truth that has been cel-
Since one gains today’s throne
not by fortune of birth but by the visible
markers of success, we dream of
the means by which we might be crowned.
worship money, we’ll never feel
truly abundant. If we worship
power, recognition, and fame,
we’ll never feel we have enough.
And if we live our lives madly
rushing around, trying to find
and save time, we’ll always find
ourselves living in a time famine,
frazzled and stressed.
“Onward, upward, and inward”
is how I ended my commencement
speech at Smith. And in many
ways, this book is bearing witness,
both through my own experience
and through the latest science, to
the truth that we cannot thrive and
ebrated by spiritual teachers, poets, and philosophers throughout
the ages, and has now been validated by modern science.
I wanted to share my own personal journey, how I learned the
hard way to step back from being so caught up in my busy life
that life’s mystery would pass
me by. But it was also important
to me to make it clear that this
was not just one woman’s journey. There’s a collective longing
to stop living in the shallows, to
stop hurting our health and our
relationships by striving so relentlessly after success as the
world defines it—and instead tap
into the riches, joy, and amaz-