Fresh Reads: The Daily Love: Growing into Grace
/How many newsletters are you currently subscribed to?
Lord knows I've got way too many in my inbox, and no matter how many times I hit that unsubscribe button, even more find their way into my email. They're like weeds!
The one newsletter I've held onto like a dear friend is The Daily Love. Written by Mastin Kipp, TDL is like a daily coffee date with the one friend who tells you everything you need to hear but - for whatever reason - don't want to. I never really saw myself being into the self-help genre, but I've always been into Mastin's raw, unapologetic writing style. While he's very much categorized in that same genre as the people he looks up to (Marie Forleo, Gabrielle Bernstein, etc.), he's always come across as genuine and honest to me.
That's not to say they don't. Mastin just has this "take me as I am" realness and confidence about his writing that sets him apart from the others. His ability to connect with his readers stems deeply from his candidness about his own insecurities, fears and serious life fuck-ups. He's been to his personal depths of hell and back, and not only has lived to tell about it, but he's using his experiences as a way to help others get past their own fears and hang-ups (me included.)
I've been reading The Daily Love for at least five years, and was so excited to hear that Mastin was taking his new book, The Daily Love: Growing into Grace on a special workshop tour with a stop in Seattle. I probably could've spent that Friday night in October doing a million other things, but there was no place I'd rather have spent those three hours than from hearing from him in person.
Just as I'm a fan of The Daily Love newsletter, I loved this book and devoured it in less than a week (which is unheard of for me nowadays!) All the pieces of Mastin's life we've been exposed to in the TDL newsletter - his rise & fall in the music industry, hitting rock bottom, getting perpetually "friend-zoned" by the women he met to falling in love, meeting Oprah and putting his all into The Daily Love - that's all woven together with some serious life lessons for us to learn from.
In the workshop and in the book, his story culminates in finding Grace and Love in the throes of despair and devastation. He shows us that success is what happens after we've survived all of our mistakes. That following your bliss is a serious bitch sometimes. That you should always seek to help others in order to find growth and opportunity yourself - and that your intentions should be pure, not with an agenda. That fear isn't the opposite of love, but rather a compass telling you where to go. That fear should fuel your courage to do what you most need to.
My favorite concept from the TDL book and workshop was of "spiritual entertainment." Basically, that all the retreats, workshops, books and articles we're consuming are nothing to us if nothing changes in our life because of them. If you ever feel yourself forgetting something as quickly as you're inspired by it, you know what spiritual entertainment is. While it's great to bring all of those things into your life, it's most worthwhile if you take immediate action and ask better questions to improve your life because of those things. As someone who is forever overwhelmed and striving to cut back on everything I'm 'consuming' online (that's another blog post), this has totally stayed with me since the workshop and reading the book. I'm doing my best to make choices tied to action and not just because it's something I saw on Facebook, Twitter or in my inbox.
You can pretty much pick your poison when it comes to the self-help guru who speaks most to you. TDL is just right for me, and I'll be subscribed for a very long time!
Check out The Daily Love: Growing into Grace book and The Daily Love website.
