Essential Spirituality
The Seven Central Practices to Awaken Heart and Mind

Roger Walsh, M.D., Ph.D.
306 pages
John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 1999
$24.95
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Review
The strength of this busy and involved work is that it is easily readable. Roger Walsh wrote it with a lay audience in mind, one that would like to combine sychotherapeutics with spiritual questing in order to achieve some fuller sense of one’s own well being in the world. To that end he succeeds nicely.

The idea is ingenious: to find those common threads that in fact weave many of the world’s great religions together. The difficult part of developing these “threads” is what the Buddhists call “mindfulness”: the ability to dwell in the moment and to see what is, uncluttered by assumptions and preconceptions. Doing so allows these ways of cultivating a sacred life to penetrate the two realms Walsh outlines: the everyday realm and the realm of conscious spirit.

I am always a little suspicious of exercises to make me better, so I approached this book with not a little cynicism. I also initially balked at its apparent simplicity. But the book (perhaps its length is an advantage here) began to convince me that something important was happening in these exercises – they made me more conscious of simplicity itself, a simple manner, a simple paying attention in a generous spirit to the world’s movements, to the actions of others, and to the behaviors of myself.

We have three arenas of awareness to cultivate, according to Walsh: the everyday perception, the eye of the soul, and the eye of the Heart. We all have the capacity for a triple vision; these exercises are proven methods for achieving this deeper seeing. As Walsh states late in the book, “The central message of great religions can be summarized very singly as ‘WAKE UP.’” His book reveals this insight forcefully through his revelations as well as short quotes from sages, gurus, rabbis, priests, and monks throughout the world. These sayings, objects for meditation, as well as anecdotes he has heard, make this book a joy to ponder, use as a manual - a kind of spiritual wake up call in 300 pages. One cannot help but get the message!

—Dennis Patrick Slattery is Core Faculty in Mythological Studies, Pacifica Graduate Institute. His most recent books are The Wounded Body: Remembering the Markings of Flesh (SUNY 2000), co editor of Depth Psychology: Meditations in the Field (Daimon-Verlag, 2000) and author of a just completed volume of poetry, Casting the Shadows, published later in 2000.

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