My Favorite Books: A Collection of Spiritual Classics and Modern Wisdom

These are books I return to and recommend, with a personal account of what reading has meant in my life. Go to the reading list.

The Alchemist was everywhere when I started what I think of as my real search. My brother Scott had died in 1991, not long before. The death of someone close knocks the wind out of anyone. Suicide is a different animal. After the burial I went back to school hoping to be a freshman again. At a party, my date asked where I'd been. I told her the truth, and she said, "Did your brother know that suicide was a sin?" That was the moment I understood I would not be normal again.

So I read. Ram Dass recordings carried me through a chaotic stretch in my late teens and early twenties. Then the Tao Te Ching, in Stephen Mitchell's translation. Siddhartha, which I still pick up every few years. Patanjali. Kornfield. Pema Chödrön. Campbell. I told myself I was studying, and some of it was study. But underneath the study was something else. I was reading the way I would later work, like the next one might be the thing that finally settled it.

That's the move I write about now. You believe the next win will fix the ache, and it doesn't, so you reach for another one. I ran the same pattern on wisdom first. Some of that reading was probably its own kind of performance. I couldn't have told you that at the time.

The strange part is that the books kept saying so. Ram Dass said seeing the possibility of transcendence is not the same as being it, and chasing the glimpse again and again doesn't get you there. Lao Tzu said in the pursuit of knowledge you add something every day, and in the practice of wisdom you drop something. George Leonard said the plateau is not a failure, that the flat stretch is where the change comes from, and I treated every flat stretch as a mistake to fix. Kornfield trained under a hard teacher and came out gentle. I studied with some harsh teachers. His image of training the mind like a puppy stayed with me. You don't beat it into staying. You pick it up and start again.

These are still the books I hand people. Pema Chödrön first, for anyone in a rough stretch. She tells you to admit that right now you feel like garbage, and to look at it anyway instead of flinching. Grace and Grit made me cry in a café in New York in my early twenties, and what I remember isn't the philosophy, it's the love story he wrote with his wife, Treya, who died of cancer.

The Alchemist didn't fix any of it. It gave me the sense that the grief I was in was one leg of something longer.

The reading list

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Try this: Stay with one passage before reaching for another

Choose a short passage from a book that matters to you. Read it once, then set it down for a moment.

What do you notice in your body? A tightening, a softening, restlessness, or nothing obvious? Give that response a few breaths before explaining what the passage means.

Notice what you want to do next. Read more, write something down, argue with it, or find another book? You can do any of those things. First, see whether there is something in your experience you have not given much attention.

The question is not how well you understood the author. If reading has become another way to try to fix yourself, the performance trap may be following you into the search for wisdom. You can let one passage matter without making it prove that you have changed.

If you want to try attending to experience without another explanation, listen to Feeling the body from the inside.

I’m Chad Herst, a coach and licensed acupuncturist (LAc) in San Francisco. I wrote a book of my own. The first chapter is twenty-eight minutes, read in my own voice. Enter your name and email and I’ll send it to you.

Fifteen minutes with one moment of your own.

TRY THE WRITTEN REFLECTION SEND ME CHAPTER ONE