Living in Process

In what may be considered a postmodern approach, the author of the bestselling Meditations for Women Who Do Too Much articulates a way of spiritual growth and development that is a recasting of ancient wisdom for modern people. Emphasizing awareness of internal experience over the striving for any external result or gaining any predetermined parcel of knowledge, and emphasizing our connection to a Creator that, Schaef says, is itself a process, she sounds radical in the way that resembles the wisdom of native peoples. Rejecting all the toxic baubles and obsessions of our addictive ""technocratic, materialistic, mechanistic"" culture, Schaef (who has learned in recent years that her biological father was Native American) draws together basic hallmarks of a life lived in process. Honesty, self-responsibility and an overarching desire to live one's life as a spiritual path: these unpretentious yet uncompromising values, one suspects, would win the approval of the old Koori man whom she quotes as once saying to her, ""You know what's the matter with you people? You work. Work is your main problem."" Despite real-life stories that show that Schaef's insights flow from an evolving work, her descriptions of what she calls ""deep process"" are so vague that readers may leave her book more frustrated than enlightened (Nov.)