Cynthia Carpenter Reviews Anne Bokma's My Year of Living Spiritually: From Woo-Woo to Wonderful - One Woman's Secular Quest for a More Soulful Life

Anne Bokma. My Year of Living Spiritually: From Woo-Woo to Wonderful - One Woman’s Secular Quest for a More Soulful Life. Douglas & McIntyre. $24.95, 256 pp., ISBN: 978-1771622332

Anne Bokma’s spiritual travelogue, is an accidental memoir that begins with a journalistic focus and slips into a story of personal growth and discovery. In 2017 Bokma faced her continuous feelings of being torn between the desire to be true to herself and the need to be accepted by her family. At the age of fifty-five, with empty nest syndrome, an addiction to busyness and drinking too much, Bokma was lost in a spiritual wilderness. All of this, and then Trump settling into the Whitehouse, gave Bokma the impetus to embark on a whole host of spiritual practices. She struck out on a local quest here in the Hamilton area to revive her spiritual soul. She took a year out to do so, and the book she wrote through this process may have arrived at something that is in fact more personal and more relatable than any straightforward journalism.

With four funerals the previous year, and still struggling with feelings concerning her family, Bokma set out on a shoestring budget, keeping all the experiences in her own backyard. The experiences she undertook include aerial and goat yoga, keeping a gratitude journal, using crystals (a kit she equates to keeping sea monkeys!), essential oils and creating a home altar, calling forth healing spirits via a shaman’s rattle and smudging (and the discussion of appropriation around this), ritual, giving up smoking (the lover who is no good for you but whom you can’t resist) and alcohol (AA meetings where you can see the tombstones in the eyes of the attendees), float tanks, a treehouse retreat, the wonderful forest bathing, a pilgrimage to Walden Pond, choir and singing at the side of a deathbed (people’s heartbeats synchronize when they join voices), holotropic breathwork, ingesting magic mushrooms, protesting Bill Cosby, and dancing with witches.

In places in the book, we see Bokma relishing these pursuits. At other times, she holds back as much skepticism as she can. Bokma sifts through her findings like an archeologist; she discards the chaff and retains the pertinent findings, her necessities.

Reading of Bokma’s mother calling CHML to have her speak of the celestial kingdom made me roll my eyes and shake my head. My mother too, had done this, although not about religion. The Calvinist theological principle of Unconditional Election mirrors the ascendency of royalty. That certain people are randomly predestined by God to receive salvation while others are left to wind up in hell smacks of the haves and have nots. These notions need dismantling and thank goodness Bokma found the strength to divorce from these principles. Having the self-knowledge that she would lose herself if she stayed, realizing that making sense of the world through the lens of religion no longer made sense to her, was her launching pad to transformation. The bravery required cannot be understated. As Swami Vivekananda said, “You have to grow from the inside out. None can teach you, none can make you spiritual. There is no other teacher but your own soul.”

Reflecting on Bokma’s experiences, hearing her personal stories, allows for connection, understanding, and reflection on humanity and our world. To me, the essential theme of My Year of Living Spiritually, is being more soulful and finding joy in this life, with a particular focus on this occurring in our later years. I found myself comfortably aligned with some of Bokma’s findings, intrigued by hosting death dinners and revisiting the experience of forest bathing.

Considering the potential fun and joy that can be found, who wouldn’t want to read about these experiences and, even better, attempt some of them ourselves?

Cynthia Carpenter lives in Hamilton, Ontario.