Suzanne Giesemann’s life was irrevocably changed when her pregnant step-daughter was killed by an isolated, unexpected lightning strike. Upon retirement from military service, Giesemann began to devote more time to spiritual practice. Here she lays out an understanding of the world in which human beings are primarily nonphysical souls, which can—importantly—communicate with other nonphysical beings for guidance.
At the practical level, THE AWAKENED WAY—Making the Shift to a Divinely Guided Life is a fine primer on meditative practice. It can feel gimmicky at times, but a number of useful acronyms—ST-F (“stuff”), BLESS ME, BEST, NO FAULT—make it easy to remember step-by-step instructions for directed thought and meditation. It also helps that, by and large, these instructions are all ways of re-framing the same basic ideas: clear time and space for stillness and silence; observe external and internal phenomena without judgment; breathe with care and intention; and visualize or articulate intention. On the one hand, this reinforces the fundamentals of the practice. On the other, it maintains focus on grounded, scientifically supported phenomena. There have been a variety of studies on the effects of different forms of meditation, and there is broad scientific consensus that, for many people, stillness, quiet, and focus can measurably affect physiological processes. Here, THE AWAKENED WAY is on solid ground, and it’s easy to recommend the text for these instructions and acronyms alone. Any reader stressed or frustrated by the aggressive pace of modern society will appreciate these straightforward, guided exercises.
However, the book demands a vast leap of faith when proposing its supernatural or paranormal claims. THE AWAKENED WAY is specifically about using meditative practice to seek the guidance of spiritual beings of various types, “beyond those who once walked in physical form to what we call angels and master teachers.” The text actually proposes that every individual has a “Team” of several beings who serve as spiritual guides.
Furthermore, the text maintains that human beings are fundamentally souls who “made a conscious choice to enroll in Earth School [i.e., to live life in a material form] with all its challenges.” Claims like these are not uncommon in spiritual spaces, but they uneasily highlight certain expectations about a privileged audience. Regardless of unmeasurable spiritual truth, it’s hard to see what such claims mean to, say, Syrian children whose entire families have been killed in the course of the civil war, or an unhoused person struggling with drug addiction. This is not to say that such people wouldn’t or can’t benefit from spiritual practice, but proclaiming “What a joy it is to realize you are not confined by the limitations of life in a body!” feels like cold comfort to people who confront those limitations daily.
Like other texts in spiritual or parapsychological discourse, THE AWAKENED WAY offers anecdotes from the author’s personal life to support its claims. In a section called “Asking for Evidence,” it proposes exercises by which the reader might verify the reality of their spiritual correspondents. In both cases, these effectively break down to various forms of self-reporting; it is not the interest or responsibility of this book to cite (or construct) any objective experiments measuring the validity of its claims. It will mostly be up to any given reader to bring their preconceived notions about “the energetic frequency of sage,” “the higher vibrations of the soul’s natural state,” or the significance of synchronicity. These types of ideas circulate in the broader discourse and are neither defined nor supported here.
Nevertheless, there is still some practical value in THE AWAKENED WAY. As the text itself argues: “Was it helpful and healing? That is the bottom line.”
Suzanne Giesemann’s THE AWAKENED WAY—Making the Shift to a Divinely Guided Life provides some valuable, easy-to-understand instructions for meditative practice, even if its underlying cosmological arguments are poorly justified.
~Dan Accardi for IndieReader