Awakening To Sacred Presence

“We are born into the magnificent invitation to become who and what we are,” writes Doreen D. Kostynuik. From a tumultuous childhood, to nursing school, to the awakening and arrival into her spiritual calling, this book reflects the author’s lifelong love of reading, writing, praying, conversing, and journeying toward wisdom.

Lucidly and beautifully written, Awakening to Sacred Presence weaves a personal and spiritual narrative from the author’s eighty years, living part-time as a Byzantine hermit and working as a spiritual director, community leader, and therapist. Within these pages lies the gentle and humble invitation to readers to awaken to Sacred Presence around and within them, to claim and exercise their own wisdom, and actualize their gifts as offerings to the world. Alongside poetry, prayer, journal entries, storytelling, and personal anecdotes, Kostynuik provides exercises and insight to develop psychic muscles: trusting inner knowing, embracing aloneness, moving through grief, and extending forgiveness, among other lessons.

At the heart of this book is a firm grounding in—and insistence on—being present to life and its teachings and being available to possibility. The deceptively simple lessons of Awakening to Sacred Presence encourage readers to arrive in the here and now, to surrender to the revelation of possibility, and risk knowing themselves, all that they are, no more and no less.