100 Books Like Soulcraft

This book has been stuck in my heart for more than 40 years. While I don’t remember much of its details—I read it as part of a middle school book club—I can still feel this book.

When I was a kid, our family was never able to travel. Abbey’s book instilled in me the deep desire to one day explore our national parks and varied natural spaces, especially desert terrain. And ever since I reached adulthood, that’s exactly what I’ve been doing.

The last book of a highly-respected psychiatrist and theologian, written as he was dying of cancer. It describes his solo camping trips into the Appalachian Mountains, where he found healing in what he called “the Power of the Slowing”. This spiritual practice taught him to welcome whatever the moment offered. When a growling bear brushes the fabric of his tent in the middle of the night, there’s nothing he can do to protect himself. But he can choose in that instant to enter the “slowing”, going into the quiet acceptance of his own terror. He can be present—“in a place beyond all coping”—to the immediacy of being alive, within the very fear that grips him.

As Roderick Nash is the scholarly historian of the term “wilderness” in the American mind, Gary Snyder is the sagacious philosopher of the term for contemporary America. I admire Snyder’s poetic style as much as his evocation of the meaning of “place”; i.e., how one can develop both a physical and a spiritual awareness of the wild around us and then transfer that awareness to a sense of one’s place in the larger country and then the planet itself.

From chapters such as “The Place, The Region, and the Commons” and “Survival and Sacrament,” I have gleaned what I can only term Snyder’s mystical appreciation of wilderness and its importance for the future of the human race. Snyder is truly the “High Priest” of how to “practice” the wild in one’s own life.

First and foremost we are sensual critters. At birth, our brains still have significant development to accomplish and focuses initially on the Sensory Control area since it’s vital for growth that we fully realize the messages and signals that the physical world is constantly sending. Here’s a poetic and philosophical exploration of how we emerged from and continue to be part of the physical sensual world. It makes sense it’s last. I’ve been reading it for two years without finishing; after a couple of pages of Abram’s beautiful wisdom about how, for instance, the first spoken languages were composed of natural sounds I need to put the book down and ruminate for a few days on the creative implications of my speaking and the sounds I make. 

I'm excited to share this book by New York Times bestselling author and scientist, known for blending science, spirituality, and human experience. This book explores the invisible field that connects all things—what Braden calls the "Divine Matrix." Drawing on quantum physics, ancient wisdom, and real-world case studies, he shows how our beliefs influence the universe, making miracles not anomalies, but natural outcomes of a deeply interconnected world.

What excites me most about this book is its invitation to live consciously. It suggests that we are not passive observers, but active participants, capable of shaping reality through heart, mind, and intention. For anyone drawn to the space between science and soul, it is both grounding and expansive, shifting your worldview gently but irrevocably.

Warning: It’s a challenging read. I tend to skip over the heavy science parts I don’t fully understand, so I don’t miss the heart of the message.

The gifts Lisa shares inside this book, are practical and powerful with many tips, tools, practices, and resources for harmonious transformation.

You will experience love at a deeper level. You being the subject of life to create the life you deserve and desire. A different perspective that is worth reading. This is the second book to Lisa’s first book Love Is the Seed.

She teaches how you can plant seeds of love in your life to live fully engaged with love, thought, and free will. Practical loving wisdom shared to help you find within you all that you need, a practical approach to self-mastery and loving yourself.  

I love this book because it helps break down the false dichotomy between science and spirituality. I also love it because Ivy League scientist and professional psychologist Lisa Miller is not afraid to talk about her own spiritual experiences, which many of her colleagues might dismiss as fantasy. I teach humanities in medicine.

I am thrilled to learn from and share her findings that spirituality helps protect against mental suffering and can help bring healing. Miller’s view that our brains are hard-wired for spiritual awareness strengthens my own view that we are fundamentally spiritual beings but live in an era desperately in need of cultural and spiritual renewal.          

I always love books that give me a clear plan to improve some aspect of my life. Comer’s book has four key principles that are easy to remember and apply every day. They include silence and solitude, Sabbath, simplicity, and slowing. My favorite quote from the book was, “For all the talk about hurry and overload, most of it is self-inflicted.”

Stanislav Grof co-authored The Stormy Search For The Self with his then-wife Christina. It was a follow-up to his earlier work, Spiritual Emergency, which emphasised that this was a global transformation in the understanding of mental illness and included contributions from other professionals in the field. It also indicated that more primitive societies viewed this situation with more sympathy than Western medicine did at the time. It was also the start of inclusion about how other phenomena related to this subject, including drug-induced states and UFOs. Current thought in recent years has also brought into the near-death experience and understanding has linked them all under the umbrella of consciousness studies.

This is one of those books you don’t find–it finds you. At least, that’s what happened to me. When my friend first recommended it, I remember reading part of the first chapter captivated. But for whatever reason, I failed to continue reading it.

Years later, it fell off the shelf while I was trying to decide which of the books on my bookshelf was the one to read. Boy, did it catapult me into a wildly evolved level of consciousness. It ripped me open (in a gentle and inviting way) cleared me of fears and beliefs I didn’t even know I had and transformed me from being a human being reaching for spirituality to a spiritual being reaching out to humanity.