The Seeker’s Guide (previously published as The New American Spirituality)
By Midas / July 16, 2013 / 3 Comments / New Age
In 1977, Elizabeth Lesser cofounded the Omega Institute, now America’s largest adult-education center focusing on wellness and spirituality. Working with many of the eminent thinkers of our times, including Zen masters, rabbis, Christian monks, psychologists, scientists, and an array of noted American figures–from L.A. Lakers coach Phil Jackson to author Maya Angelou–Lesser found that by combining a variety of religious, psychological, and healing traditions, each of us has the unique ability to satisfy our spiritual hunger.
In The Seeker’s Guid, she synthesizes the lessons learned from an immersion into the world’s wisdom traditions and intertwines them with illuminating stories from her daily life. Recounting her own trials and errors and offering meditative exercises, she shows the reader how to create a personal practice, gauge one’s progress, and choose effective spiritual teachers and habits. Warm, accessible, and wise, this book provides directions through the four landscapes of the spiritual journey:
THE MIND: learning meditation to ease stress and anxiety
THE HEART: dealing with grief, loss, and pain; opening the heart and becoming fully alive
THE BODY: returning the body to the spiritual fold to heal and
overcome the fear of aging and death
THE SOUL: experiencing daily life as an adventure of meaning and mysteryElizabeth Lesser, cofounder of the Omega Institute, speaks to America’s cross-pollination of religious, psychological, metaphysical, and ancient traditions that have flowered into contemporary spirituality. Like many seekers, Lesser has discovered a deeply personal religious path–one that wandered through Zen Buddhist monasteries, meandered through Christian churches, dabbled in African and Native American traditions, and expanded into the teachings of the Great Mother. Using her own journey as the road map, Lesser discusses why so many Americans are coming to a deeply personal form of religion–one that does not prescribe to a specific doctrine or definition of God.
Although she expertly performs the role of memoirist and observer, Lesser has stretched this book into a useful tool for all seekers. She offers numerous suggestions, such as how to listen to your body, increase your spiritual bank account, “live the questions” rather than “seek the answers,” and create a supportive community. This is a moving workbook for anyone who’s hoping to find, claim, or simply maintain their spiritual truths. –Gail Hudson
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Seeker’s Guide is Tour de Force Institutions of religion and learning take note: Elizabeth Lesser’s “Seeker’s Guide” is proof positive that personal experience is equal to tradition and scholarship as a pathway to truth. Elizabeth’s life of seeking, organizing, promoting and teaching spirituality is disclosed beautifully in this multifaceted work. She shows by her own story, by her inspiring writing, and by her practical guidelines for meditation how ordinary mortals can create the sacred space for spiritual fulfillment in their own lives. Readers will find scripts for specific spiritual objectives, pearls of wisdom for the refrigerator, models for parenting, friendship, and marriage, holistic prescriptions for mental and physical health, deep prayers, profound wisdom, and the best bumper-sticker slogans in the universe. Her use of resources is erudite without pedantry or scholasticism. The book is at once a spiritual autobiography, a systematic theology of spiritual formation, and a useful handbook…
A Map of the New American Spiritual World Eliabeth Lesser’s book, The New American Spirituality, is a highly readable, thoroughly informative, and deeply felt dispatch from the frontier of America’s ever-evolving spiritual journey. As a cofounder of Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York, Lesser has been in the thick of it for almost 30 years, organizing workshops and conferences nationwide, meeting and nurturing extended relationships with the leaders in the field–from Maya Angelou to Ram Dass–and helping put together the nation’s largest and most successful learning center that seeks to explore and weave together many of the emerging threads of a country in the throes of perhaps the most extraordinary spiritual rebirth since the nineteenth-century Great Awakening. So much more than an academic treatment of the subject, this book is also part memoir and part guidebook. It is perhaps no accident that Omega Institute began in a small, white clapboard settlement that had belonged to the Shakers, who even in their…
An intelligent and tender exploration of the seekers’ path I have been to many “new age” workshops and have read tons of the books available on self-help and spirtuality. Some of it was great, but often I felt as if something was missing. I wondered what relevance the spirtual journey had to my psycholigical growth and I worried that my concerns with psychology were too self-absorbing. Lesser captures the essence of this tension in her book. She looks at how the spiritual and psychological path can intersect in a way that anyone can understand – and she does it so well that I found myself actually saying “ah ha!” as I read along. She also speaks in a frank, candid way about the “new age” movement, and that is really refreshing. It sounds like she has met absolutely everybody in the field and talks about them all as human beings instead of big stars. What a relief!