Mark Matousek is the author of two memoirs, Sex Death Enlightenment and The Boy He Left Behind. He also wrote Ethical Wisdom, a book we found profound and spiritually edifying.

Before you get down to the serious business of exploring your life through Matousek's 48 lessons, you might spend some time pondering this prelude quotation:

"When you tell the truth, your story changes.
When your story changes, your life is transformed."

In her foreword to this paperback, Joan Borysenko shares the author's definition of the sacred: "The sacred connects us to what is most tender, expansive, and loving in us."

Matousek begins with the challenge of answering the question: Who am I? Each of us has a creation myth, a family saga that gets us going on a path that is quite mysterious. The author gives us a primal exercise: "Try to imagine your own conception." Another significant exercise is to grapple with self-image, the portrait in our heads that we imagine ourselves to be.

In chapters on Touching the Shadow, Your True Face, Demons at the Gate, The Question of Meaning, Love Invents Us, and six more chapters about Dropping the Masks and Awakening, Matousek returns again and again to the idea that our emotional connection determines what is sacred to us. Tapping into this treasure is part of the awakened life. And writing is the tool that gets us there!