BLISSFUL THINKING

Kirchner writes of how a painful divorce led her to leave a job in Qatar for a yoga-training sojourn in India as part of a search for healing.

In 2007, the author, a recovering alcohol and drug addict, felt a connection with a man at a 12-step program meeting in Goa, India. Both had been sober for about a decade; he said he was “a love addict through and through.” Soon, she found out that he had a girlfriend. The author was deeply depressed and enduring early menopause, which escalated her alternative healing efforts; an Ayurvedic doctor prescribed a helpful herbal blend, but her depression persisted. An  application form for a 10-day silent Buddhist meditation retreat brought back memories of psychiatric hospitalization. Later in 2007, Kirchner moved to New York City where she taught yoga, took a writing class, attempted online dating, attended meetings, and continued exploring Buddhism. Her mother’s cancer diagnosis occasioned a visit home to Murrysville, Pennsylvania, where she remembered an alcoholic adolescence. After learning that her ex-husband was living with a woman with whom he planned to adopt a child, she pursued psychotherapy, then an energy healer; eventually, she returned to Goa, where she visited a “sex ashram.”Finally, she returned to the United States, where she dealt with another loss, and found a place to settle. In this remembrance, Kirchner’s voice is self-aware and humble, making her feel like a trustworthy guide. The themes of craving love, dissecting personal flaws, and searching for peace amid chaos recur throughout the book, but her stories of her troubled personal history are effectively punctuated by the wisdom of mentors. She also openly delves into her difficult feelings surrounding the end of her marriage: “I’d been telling myself that divorce was not the same as death, but the heart doesn’t make distinctions in grief. My god-sized void had taken on the force of gravity. I feared being crushed by the weight of it.” Readers will feel a tension between resistance and surrender as she describes each new experience and then, importantly, leaves it behind.