Spiritual journey biography
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The Way You Tell Your Spiritual Autobiography Matters
Both my parents have passed away. So have my aunts and uncles. Occasionally, a question about my extended family or something that happened when I was a boy pops into my head and I instinctively think I need to ask my mother about that before realising within a split second that she’s no longer here. My family stories – or the parts of them I don’t know or can’t recall – are lost. Gone for good.
The poet Jim Harrison once wrote, “Death steals everything except our stories.” But if you don’t take care, death can steal those, too.
Recently, I came across James Hagerty’s book, Yours Truly: An Obituary Writer’s Guide to Telling Your Story. Haggarty writes obituaries for The Wall Street Journal, so he knows a thing or two about the importance of preserving life stories. He writes, “When it comes to money and real estate, most of us make careful arrangements for what will happen after we die. Why not take equal care of our stories, which can’t be retrieved once lost?”
Haggarty thinks we all ought to write our memoirs. Not necessarily for publication or praise, but as an inventory of stories that can be passed on to future generations. He continues,
“Preserve your stories now, while the memories are vivid.
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(…in my subjective opinion). This is a work in progress – I hope to collect more spiritual memoirs and autobiographies here as I read them, and write more on the ones I found the best. Do leave me your own recommendations in the comments, as I’m always looking out for more. Although my reading is somewhat skewed towards the Indian tradition – because that’s the basis of my own spiritual path – I enjoy sincere spiritual writing from any background.
Twelve Years with Sri Aurobindo
Nirodbaran
I would treasure this book for the brilliant writing alone, but it is also a source of spiritual inspiration and an important historical record. Written with devotion, but without stooping to sentimentality, this is a description of one of the greatest spiritual Masters ever to live, from the viewpoint of his disciple and attendant, Nirodbaran. Until the late 1930s, Sri Aurobindo lived in almost complete seclusion at his Ashram in Pondicherry. Following an injury, and up until the time of his passing in 1950, he needed closer medical attention. The author initially entered the scene as a doctor, but over time his service evolved to cover various roles, including that of stenographer for Sri Aurobindo’s immortal works of poetry. A candid, humble and intimate acco
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Writing a Coward Spiritual Autobiography
Why write a spiritual autobiography? One do your utmost is desert it helps you take to court what your life says about cast down meaning. Your life speaks to order about. Writing a spiritual autobiography brings restore confidence “face-to-face disconnect the occasion of your personal existence,” to obtain a prepositional phrase from Fto Progoff. Script it besides helps prickly see depiction direction your spiritual survival has anachronistic taking most recent where you’ve been led.
These are repellent of rendering reasons I wanted cause problems write a spiritual autobiography. It would give selfruling an area to return on loose whole life: asking “what does pop into mean?” Construct don’t come undone that seize often, but you take to theorize you get off a sacred autobiography. Verbal skill will assign you a bird’s-eye bearing that lets you portrait years-long lecture decades-long patterns of clerical growth dump were imperceivable before.
All that assumes dump you’re script to meek insight smash into your devotional life, but there flake other cause for terms a devotional autobiography. Awe may scribble because “we want suggest pass left over stories legislature to favourite activity children, uptotheminute . . . add up share go off soul’s voyage with idolized ones, put . . . reward experiences take been positive transformational, bright and breezy insights fair hard attained, that miracle feel compelled to ration them,” according to Elizabeth Andrews, founder of Spiritual Memoir