Ora Nadrich is one of those people who makes you feel empowered. Her new book is titled Mindfulness & Mysticism: Connecting Present Moment Awareness with Higher States of Consciousness, and as its title would suggest the book is about just that. Self-care and, well, mindfulness and all that that entails. The tone is always sunny in Mindfulness & Mysticism, principally because Nadrich is expert at presenting herself in a way implying she has found what she preaches on a personal level. It feels like she wants to share it out of a genuine sense of caring. While a decorated mindfulness coach and institutive entrepreneur, she comes across first and foremost as a very real human being.
ABUT THE AUTHOR: https://www.oranadrich.com/11-11-21
Someone dedicated on a fundamental level to the tenets she is so passionate about, principally the idea that to achieve a state of true mindfulness and interconnectivity is to strip away a series of layers. Specifically layers of societally-induced rhetoric that can blind us from our true nature, in a sense opting for one to return to a state of healthy purity, and healthy innocence. This is especially reinforced in the book’s eighth chapter, evocatively titled Being and Becoming. “Being and Becoming are happening to us simultaneously, but if we don’t allow ourselves to emerge naturally, like the lotus does from muddy waters, we interrupt the process of becoming, which happens as it will. We must know that we are always in a constant flow of ‘perpetual Becoming’ as Hermann Hesse said, and if we don’t push, or force the delicate evolution of our being, we will become the ripened, wise version of ourselves when we are ready,” Nadrich writes.
She goes on to elaborate, “Mindfulness reminds us to be fully present in our
being, no matter what stage of being we are in. It shows what we need from it to learn and grow. When we surrender to being real, as I spoke about in the previous chapter: Self-Surrender, and resist the false self, or any temptation we might have to hide who we are for fear of not being loved, we are aiding our becoming, as if we are midwifing the birth of our authentic self at every turn. This is the ebb and flow of our being/becoming, and what we begin to realize is that we are actually orchestrating our union with reality, which is the root, or the essence of the mystical experience.”
By making the process come across as so bell clear and frankly, like something belonging in the bastion of common sense, Nadrich seems to have accomplished what she set out to do. Write a book that tonally feels like it’s geared for the naysayers and the dubious. The skeptics, and the downright disbelievers. People jaded and cynical, appropriately so, by the current climate of the world we’re living in. The author never writes with the kind of desperation like she’s trying to convince you. Rather it’s more like she’s just an expert at how to draw you in closer, holding out the berries in a way you will feel moved to take. If it weren’t for that kind of literary approach, Mindfulness & Mysticism would join ranks with many other books of its kind. Some quite respectable, some downright excellent, but with a more exclusionary and tailored audience. But the generosity and empathy from which Nadrich writes raises the bar with her achievement, and makes Mindfulness & Mysticism that much more compelling as a result.
Garth Thomas