Angel Kyodo Williams is an activist, entrepreneur, Zen priest, and founder of urbanPEACE, a spiritually based empowerment incentive.

Over the years, she has developed Warrior-Spirit Trainings, meaningful practices that transcend boundaries of race, class, gender, and culture. Along with other memberships, she sits on the founding board of the Institute for Women, Spirituality, and Justice.

"We lose our minds to Alzheimer's and our bodies to cancers. Suffering and discomfort seem to be everywhere and without end," writes Williams in her description of the desires and cravings that attach themselves to our pain. As a Zen priest, she states that meditation and the eightfold path can end the discomforts that dog us.

Williams does a fine job describing taking refuge, teachers who engage us, and the most important treasure of all -- community. Or as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., taught: "No individual can live alone, no nation can live alone and anyone who feels that he can live alone is sleeping through a revolution."

In her examination of anger, Williams points out that this volatile emotion is especially complex and frustrating. But she believes that hatred is a blinding feeling that walls us off from the humanity of others. Also covering greed and ignorance, the author writes, "They are like our friends or lovers. We wake them up. take them to work, and then take them to bed again."

In sections of the book titled "Steps for Creating a Spiritual Life" and "Living Every Day with Fearlessness and Grace," Williams sprints through her Zen-colored examinations of the Warrior-Spirit, compassion, the profound art of being still, seeing things as they are, and more. She ends on a high note of hope: "What we all need is to learn to live without walls. We have to let the illusion of separation fall away and replace it with active, lively engagement of every aspect of our lives. This is not just for personal growth, but collective growth. This is not intended as self-help, but self-examination. It's taking a long, piercing gaze at who you are in the world, who you perceive your 'self' to be, and then transcending all those ideas so that you can live freely, un-fixated, unselfish, and clear. In other words, it's not about working on yourself but waking yourself up."