The Path to Love: Spiritual Strategies for Healing by Deepak Chopra.

This book is very spiritual, very insightful, and very moving.

This wasn’t a book that I traveled with often. Instead, I reserved it only for home, and usually made sure that I had a highlighter, a blue pen, and a notepad full of stickies nearby for accurate and immediate note-taking. It was a book that I wanted to learn from from the very beginning, and I think I accomplished that.

It visits a lot in its 328 pages, and it makes sure that you have all the tools that you need to embark on a mental and emotional transformation if that is your goal.

One of my favorite takeaways from it was this terribly paraphrased note that I jotted down: The meanings that you extract from tender/everyday situations are the lessons that Love is trying to teach you every day. Be still and listen.
Another: What do I expect from others in a relationship? I can provide that to myself in my relationship with me.

Additionally, one of the excerpts from this book that dragged me by my edges was this: “If you examine any negative trait you insist is present in another person, you will find the same trait hiding in yourself. The more you deny this trait, the more strongly you will have to project it.” First of all, this was rude. Secondly, it was accurate.

While reading this book, I was in a very uncomfortable space at my former place of employment and was engaged in, I felt, a rather odd and (at times) contentious relationship with my boss and her severely under-qualified best friend. I picked up on several emotionally gross traits that were fastened to their character and that would come out whenever they were challenged: avoidance, defiance, superiority, deflection. When I read that excerpt, I immediately thought of my current situation and tried hard (really hard) to employ some self-reflection and see if those same traits were active in me whenever I was cornered. Spoiler: they weren’t. Seriously, they weren’t, and you can even ask my best friends. Whenever I’m challenged, I love to ask questions, figure out where I went wrong at, apologize if necessary, and make the proper adjustments going forward. Now, I understand that my one-off situation is not the best selling point for this book, but hear me out: Dr. Chopra is correct in his finding that the things that we resist most in others are the very things that we’re resisting in ourselves. I find myself reaaallyyy not liking lazy people, but when I get the chance, you honestly cannot pry me out of my bed. Same with those who do not respond to my proddings of communication as I sit here and write this post with 3 unopened emails and 4 idle text messages in my inboxes. Deepak Chopra is onto something, and he’s not letting up.

He also mentioned: “To build a new reality, you need new mental structures. … You have to break down the known to enable the unknown to enter.” Straight facts.

I’m in a very odd space in my late twenties, and it’s taken a lot of mental restructuring that I have not yet mastered (but that I am also not yet wiling to give up on) to arrive at peace with myself at the end of every day. What I can say is that this book has helped me to be patient with myself and with the parts of myself that I am not entirely fond of that I also see in others. It has taught me how to produce empathy in situations that I would not have done so before and how to see things through a more loving lense as opposed to an annoyed one.

I won’t mislead you into believing that this is an easy, breezy read, and that it can be consumed with background noise. It can (anything can be done, really), but it can’t if you intend to learn something from it, and above all else, I seriously implore you to learn something from it.

Read duration: It took me more months to finish this book than I am proud to admit. However, with consistency and dedication, I do think this can be read (and retained) in a month. Maybe 5 weeks.

Comin’ atcha on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. And Audible!