Soulful Reading for 2025

5 mystical, metaphysical books to fill your cup

In the endnotes of his brilliant opus Sun House, author David James Duncan gives readers a peak into his own reading practice:

“I usually read mystical or metaphysical material first thing in the morning, when my mind is most clear, and often a single deep insight fills my cup.”

I love this description. Because I share the same practice. In the morning, after I meditate and before I journal, I read a brief section from a piece of wisdom literature. My definition of wisdom literature, called “mystical or metaphysical material” by Duncan in the above quote, is broad. It isn’t just classic texts like the Bhagavad Gita (featuring Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s commentary) or The Cloud of Unknowing (translation by Carmen Acevedo Butcher), both of which are currently in my morning rotation. It also includes fiction that stirs the soul (and often includes mystical themes), as well as more recent nonfiction offerings that interact with ancients texts and teachings.

But no matter what type of text I’m reading, how I’m reading it pretty much looks the same. I read small sections. Slowly. I savor it. Because when I take this approach, I am creating the conditions by which I will most likely to hear from it―or, more accurately, hear what my soul wants to say to me.

If you don’t have this kind of reading practice, or are looking for some soulful, nourishing reading as 2025 begins, here are some of my favorites from 2024:

Sun House by David James Duncan

I took my time with this one. It’s a book filled with fantastic, textured characters whose ordinary and extraordinary experiences weave their lives together across time and place into a shared purpose. It got me thinking about the magic of my own experience in finding and growing community.

It's an odd quirk of our language that the abbreviations of the words "saint" and "street" are an identical "St." and "St." (St. Catherine / Front St. / St. Francis / Burnside St. / St. Columba / Water St. / St. Julian / Stark St.) To ask the same two letters to represent the God-struck one moment and pavement the next leaves me picturing robes, sandals, and saint-burger mashed into the pavement by a stream of trucks and cars. So how odd it feels to confess that in the years 2012 through 2014, while taping interviews for this book, I took four long Ocean-walks with Jervis McGraff through urban Portland and found him to be so inarguably streetly, yet covertly saintly, that I now sometimes dream the Saints Catherine, Francis, Columba, and Teresa wandering joyous along Front, Burnside, Water, and Stark Streets.

Inarguably streetly, yet covertly saintly… I like the sound of that.

The Flesh and the Fruit by Vanya Leilani

This is a special book. And not just because it is written by my friend Vanya, who appears in my book The Way Home due to the teacher/ritual facilitator role she’s played in my life. It’s a profound work, drawing upon her own personal journey and her expertise as a depth psychologist.

Even as I devoted my life to an unfathomable mystery, I did it from a too-small space. The purpose and meaning were singular and narrow. The One Way was etched in everything we said and did and aspired to. The One Way offered a certain safety, and also unyielding walls. Walls are notable in that they simultaneously keep things out and in. This is how what keeps us safe might also become our prison.

I love the way Vanya honors her past spiritual experience, while also acknowledging that the container she inherited was, ultimately, limiting.

The Five Invitations by Frank Ostaseski

This book was not only an early morning read, but also a frequent companion on my drives between visiting hospice patients. Ostaseski shares insights from his work as an end-of-life companion that help the reader embrace the gift of life—as well as mortality—and live more fully here and now.

In the horror of my own suffering, I always had held out the hope that one day someone would rescue me. I had imagined that I would be saved by love coming toward me. Just the opposite. I was rescued when love came through me. I discovered love through acts of kindness... not offered to me, but coming from me. I think of the words of the late John O’ Donohue, who wrote, "We do not need to go out and find love; rather, we need to be still and let love discover us."

The experience with Jasmine and the other disabled kids unlocked a compassion hidden deep in the heart of my suffering. I discovered an essential love that was reliable, vast, and undamaged. This became a source of true support, my steadfast guide throughout many years of sometimes amazing, sometimes trying experiences in hospice care.

Love is within me. Within you. Within everyone. Because it is who we are! It’s just that we’ve forgotten. If there’s one thing I could get across to everyone, it would be this!

The Mermaid Chair by Sue Monk Kidd

A friend had told me a few years ago that I needed to read this work of fiction by Sue Monk Kidd, whose Dance of the Dissident Daughter has long inspired me. But I didn’t get around to it until I came across a copy—and an autographed advance reader copy at that!—in a Little Free Library in my neighborhood. It’s got monks and soul and sex.

This will sound ridiculous, I guess, but my life had started to feel so stagnant, like it was atrophied. Everything shrunk down to the roles I played. I had loved doing them, Dee, I really had, but they were drying up, and they weren't really me. Do you understand? I felt there had to be some other life beneath the one I had, like an underground river or something, and that I would die if I didn't dig down to it.

She’s right. There is an underground river within each one of us. And the cost of not digging down into it is steep!

Good Work by Paul Millerd

This one is an outlier offering to this collection of books, from writer

Paul Millerd

, who I initially connected with about his first book The Pathless Path. It is not an overtly spiritual book—he might even object to this classification. But it is nonetheless. Because he expertly explores something essential to each one of us—the vocational journey and questions about the work that is each of ours to do.

I've come to understand that one of the most ambitious things we can do, following our own true path, does not feel like we might expect ambition to feel. It does not come with pain, or contraction, or endless suffering. Instead, it feels light. It feels natural, as if everything you are meant to be doing is obvious. And all you need to do to "be ambitious" is simply to follow this feeling and stay connected to it.

Our culture will attempt to steal your inner ambition and convince you to use it to do what organizations, your parents, or your manager might want. But this is not your ambition. Your ambition desires more than a job title, a salary, or a brand-name company. It is a fire that burns inside of you-not for a bigger paycheck, but for a bigger life.

Your mission is to make sure that this flame never dies.

I’m all in on this mission. And I take courage to keep fanning this flame from people like Paul.

So how about you?
What “metaphysical material” have you been reading?
Drop it in the comments.
I’d love to know!