The Contentment Dividend: Meditations for Realizing Your True Self received a 4+ star review, making it an IndieReader Approved title.
Following find an interview with author Michael Goddart.
What is the name of the book and when was it published?
The Contentment Dividend: Meditations for Realizing Your True Self;
Pub. date: June 15, 2024
What’s the book’s first line?
You have the power within you to liberate your soul from the mind’s dominance and achieve reunion with God.
What’s the book about? Give us the “pitch.”
The Contentment Dividend offers forty-nine intuited meditations from higher consciousness that enables readers and listeners to discover immortal truths of existence, understand how to realize their true self, and achieve ongoing contentment.
What inspired you to write the book? A particular person? An event?
After completing many interviews for A New Now, as well as In Search of Lost Lives, I was feeling a strong urge to discover the title of the next book. Names of potential meditations had been coming through on their own accord, and I had been recording them along with some notes. Just before New Year’s, I did “intuitive sussing” and word by word, discovered the title of the new book and the provisional subtitle.
What’s the main reason someone should really read this book?
The main reason is to enjoy an amazing journey that will further each person’s self-realization and spiritual evolution.
When did you first decide to become an author?
A month after I started my junior year abroad as a U.C. Berkeley History Fellow at the University of Warwick, England, the perception came that I was to be a writer. Then I began an experimental novel.
Is this the first book you’ve written?
This is my fifth published book. I‘ve also written two yet-to-be published novels, as well as the sequel to BLISS, more BLISS. The most recent book, A New Now, won six book awards and received seven honors. International journals have published excerpts from my spiritual diaries that focus on meetings with realized Masters. Before departing this year for a spiritual retreat in India, I converted a great many Word Perfect files to Word and assembled these and Word files in one document that is now 800 pages and includes twenty-four diaries of my experiences on the spiritual path. At some point, this and an abridged version may be published, as many friends have loved the excerpts they’ve requested.
What do you do for work when you’re not writing?
I was in International Tax, with a very demanding tax practice. Having worked in twenty-one countries, that and my spiritual quest have taken me to over fifty countries.
What’s the best and the hardest part of being an indie?
The hardest part: doing promotion, rather than writing something new. The best part: writing what I’m inspired to write without constraints, and being able to choose the publisher, editor, designer, publicist, et al, who are the best match for me and the book.
What’s a great piece of advice that you can share with fellow indie authors?
Cultivate and follow your intuition and keep strengthening your sense of what is true.
Would you go traditional if a publisher came calling? If so, why?
Yes, if the right match of agent, editor, designer came about. The main reason would be to allow a greater number of readers to engage with the teachings of true Saints and realized Masters in order to understand existential truths and further their spiritual evolution.
Is there something in particular that motivates you (fame? fortune?)
Articulating the spiritual and writing books that are accessible, clear, encouraging, and revelatory.
Which book do you wish you could have written?
The book that has been coming through, so that I can have written these virgin meditations and finally know what they are all about and how they can serve readers.