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The writing in This Here Flesh is so breathtakingly beautiful. It invites quiet, thoughtful reading and contemplation and is one of those books that leaves your soul just a little bit bigger for having read it. Told as a series of stories in simple, powerful prose, it feels like sitting down with an old friend, someone who knows your deepest truths and seeks to help you rediscover them.

Honestly, I could put almost any book by Hahn in this list. All of them are that good. But this one found me in a particularly vulnerable place in early 2021, and has really stuck with me since. In No Mud, No Lotus, we’re encouraged to embrace our suffering with curiosity, compassion, and mindfulness, not with the intent to stop suffering, but to reframe it as another portion of this many-faceted life we live. “When we know how to suffer,” he says, “we suffer much, much less.”

This was one of the first books I read when I was exploring Buddhism, and it’s still the one I recommend the most often. For those who aren’t familiar, Brad Warner is a punk-rock musician and filmmaker who is also a Zen monk. While I don’t always agree with what he says, what he says always makes me think, and that to me is more important than always agreeing. There is No God is a deep dive into the meaning of the divine from his unique perspective, delivered with lots of laughs to help the philosophy go down easier. Years ago, it was a radical thought for me to realize I don’t have to define the divine in order to feel that presence; it’s something that still shakes me to this day.

I don’t know why it’s taken me this long to pick up a book by Anne Lamott. I often like to think that some books find me when I need them, and I believe that was the case with Almost Everything, which found me earlier this year. The rambling, stream-of-consciousness style is easy to read and littered with gleaming nuggets of insight and gentle wisdom, the sorts of statements that hit you days or weeks later with a little lightning bolt of understanding.

Self-compassion has become a very buzzy phrase in the last couple of years. It’s something I first learned about many years ago in therapy, and it’s a practice I still use every day. Buddhist teacher Tara Brach makes this often-challenging concept more accessible through a series of guided meditations called RAIN, designed to help us view ourselves with kindness, love, and compassion and to help us deal with negative and limiting self-talk.

Designed as a companion to her bestselling How to Be Sick, this book is a pocket- or purse-sized set of reminders and meditations to help you navigate the tough spots in life and to recenter in the face of unexpected adversity. I keep a copy in my purse. It’s super helpful for navigating stressful doctor’s appointments or keeping me calm in unfamiliar situations.

This little book packs a big punch. It’s broken into ten chapters, each chapter containing three sections that help guide readers through the many spiritual paths David Bowie wandered. Each chapter starts with a story from Bowie’s life, explains the life lesson to be gleaned from it, and closes with exercises the reader can do to apply those teachings to their own journey.

In such a busy world, resting is a radical idea. And yet, taking time to rest and be still is vital if we are to continue putting one foot in front of another. Drawing from Yogic philosophies, Raheem offers us poses, reflections, and guidance to help us gather our endurance for whatever lies ahead.