I believe part of my calling on Earth is to help people connect to ideas that expand their vision of who they really are and all they can be. That’s why I created *Super Soul Sunday*. After filming more than two hundred hours of heart- expanding interviews, I began to envision a truly transcendent book—with words you can hold in your hand, be inspired by, and carry with you forever. The photos also hold deep meaning for me. Many of the images you’ll see were taken at my home in Santa Barbara, where I feel the presence of God, and the connection to *All* that is greater than myself, most deeply.
Morning walks with my dogs represent a form of prayer for me, taking time to delight in the glory of nature that surrounds me. Baby tears grass laced between a stone path, fallen acorns, a bird’s nest, these photos represent to me both the majestic abundance of our shared world and the unseen details we often miss in our lives. Like spirituality itself, the simplest things, when appreciated with reverence, take on an entirely new meaning. Suddenly that single blade of grass has gone from ordinary to poignant to explicit and finally miraculous in its beauty. As you read *The Wisdom of Sundays*, my prayer is that you will uncover the little spaces in your own life, find comfort in them, gain insight to their meaning, and see the way forward to an extraordinary new existence.
Within these pages, I’ve collected some of the most powerful spiritual lessons, sparks of brilliance, and *aha* moments from *Super Soul Sunday* that continue to resonate with me today. What I know for sure is the most valuable gift you can give yourself is the time to nurture the unique spirit that is you. Your life, just like mine, is unfolding according to your own truth. No one has been through what you have been through, not in the way that you’ve experienced it. And yet, all pain is the same. Our sadness and sorrows, joys and triumphs bind us in the common thread of humanity. The sooner we realize the connection, the more elevated life becomes.
What you will learn from these spiritual teachers is that with every decision, you are claiming the essence of the phenomenon that is your life. The great American mythologist, author, and philosopher Joseph Campbell once said, “The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.” I believe your true purpose here on Earth is to align yourself with the great spiritual force, your divine inner compass, already at work in your life. I hope that *The Wisdom of Sundays* will illuminate your path to becoming all that you were meant to be. Embrace and enjoy the journey!
Years ago, I invited renowned spiritual teacher Caroline Myss to be a guest on *The Oprah Winfrey Show*. I had just been introduced to Caroline’s groundbreaking work on healing and intuition and was so excited about what I had learned that I couldn’t wait to share it with the audience. I hoped they might experience the same spiritual awakening. Unfortunately, that’s not what happened.
I want to give you just a very brief, and very quick, understanding of these different areas of our life that we call the body, the mind, the soul. Your body is mostly carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. You have stardust that was once circulating in that body. There are at least a million atoms in your body. In just the last three weeks, a quadrillion atoms have gone through your body that have gone through the body of every other living species on this planet.
We experience our body as this three-dimensional structure in space and time. We know where the mind is. We experience it as our thoughts, our feelings, our emotions, our ideas. But where is the soul? Between every thought, we have a little space. That still presence that you feel, that’s your soul. It was there when you were a baby. It was there when you were a teenager. It’s there now. It will be there tomorrow. And if you get really in touch with it, if you become familiar with this center of awareness that you really are, you will see it’s your ticket to freedom.
Everyone is spiritual whether they know it or not. When I consider what it means to be spiritual, I consider the fact that individuals are waking up to a dimension of their being or their soul. It is the most real part of us. When one begins to really feel into the spiritual dimension of their being, they bump into love. They bump into compassion. They bump into beauty. They bump into real peace and real joy. And that begins to be where they live their life from, real, authentic beings that have a tremendous amount of meaning in their life.