This is book by Pierre Pradervand and Jonathan Ellerby is about healing. Not just healing an ailing body or mind. It is about healing a sense of separation from the All-Encompassing, Unconditional Love of our Creator. It is about recovering from the seeming fall from grace, and reclaiming our divinely mandated experience of heaven on earth.

But how does one explain healing when it has little to do with the mind, or even the body, and everything to do with Love?

Over history and prehistory, a similar message has been broadcasted by a number of enlightened souls—poets, teachers, artists, writers. But, like a dandelion that keeps sprouting through concrete, its seeds fall on the fallow ground.

Mr. Pradervand explains that it has not helped that human power structures, such as religion and government, systematically challenge and subdue the message. We have only to look at our present state of civilization to see the result: unprecedented chaos and confusion. The author goes on to compare religious and spiritual teachings, and to show how they too have either manifested separation and alienation or preserved the teaching of transcendent Love.

Is there a way to free oneself from the spell that leaves us feeling alone and alienated?

The author says, yes, yes, and yes. He did it, and so can we. For him it was a sudden awakening. His journey away from religion and into the heart of Love (another word for God), began when he was suffering from an illness. At the time, he encountered a flight attendant who was the “incarnation of kindness.” He was so deeply touched by her attention to a little boy flying alone that he was enveloped by it. He later reflects on the experience this way: “Everything was taking place on the level of the heart.” In so many words, he surrendered his identity to that feeling or essence—Love without opposites. When he came back to the awareness of his human state, he was physically healed.

This book is not about fixing, reforming, or improving the body; it is about fixing, reforming, and improving our relationship to Love—which can and often does lead to physical healing. In a nutshell, it is about re-claiming one’s self-image. “The real healing, which transformed my whole life, was that vision of existence and of a universe governed by love,” writes Mr. Pradervand.
Perhaps today, more than any other time in the Earth’s history, humanity needs to reclaim this pure and essential teaching. “The Gentle Art of Spiritual Discernment” delivers it in a kind, non-judgmental manner to anyone wanting to manifest peace and well-being, even in a turbulent world.

I recommend that you read "The Gentle Art of Spiritual Discernment: A Guide to Discovering Your Personal Path" slowly, contemplate the ideas, the stories, the messengers, commit them to heart. It will be a sure friend as you cross the desert stretches of doubt, fear, and confusion, and at last realize that you are a transcendent being, loved beyond measure.

Heartfelt thanks to Destiny Books and Pierre Pradervand for sending me an ARC.