The Book of Waking Up

Experiencing the Divine Love That Reorders a Life

By: Seth Haines, Shauna Niequist

Narrated by: Seth Haines, Liz Stanislawski

Length: 4 hrs and 54 mins

Publisher's summary

The Book of Waking Up invites you to wake to your coping mechanisms, find the why behind your pain, and walk into the divine love of God.

The inevitable pain of life gives us many reasons to check out - and many ways to do it. Alcohol, entertainment, pills, shopping, porn, chasing success, cashing checks, and collecting social media "likes - these and so many other things anesthetize us from the wounds of everyday living. As Seth Haines wrote in his award-winning book, Coming Clean, "We're all drunk on something."

In his compelling follow-up, The Book of Waking Up, Seth invites you into the story of healing. He invites you to see your coping mechanisms for what they are - lesser lovers, which cannot bring the peace, freedom, and wholeness you crave. Through guided reflections, sustainable soul practices, and stories from Seth's life and others, The Book of Waking Up points you toward the divine love of God that has the power to transform your life.

As Seth writes, "Addiction is misplaced adoration." Now, join him on a journey toward the only love worth adoring, the only love that cures a soul. Join him on the journey to waking up.

©2020 Seth Haines (P)2020 Zondervan

Critic reviews

"Poet Haines, who wrote about his alcoholism and recovery in Coming Clean, addresses the importance of waking up from a life of addiction to a life of delighting in God in this thoughtful memoir." (Publishers Weekly)

Re-Centering to the fullness of life

I wasn’t excited about the somber note that this foot started on, but found myself grateful. I appreciated the different perspectives on the passions as the writer guides you towards the final point and purpose.

Thank you for sharing, Seth Haines. This is the nudge I needed.

Treat yourself

I didn’t know what to expect. It was beyond what I expected. It woke me up. And I keep wakening, which was the whole point.

practical and straightforward

incredibly straightforward, practical, and bathed in humble life experience. a refreshing and honest reassessment of all the “coping mechanisms” we use in life and how to come awake to them.

A thoughtful invitation to wakeful freedom

I read this on both paper and Audible, and thoroughly enjoyed both.

First of all, take this as a disclaimer if you like, or as a testimony, as I'd offer it: Seth is an old friend, and I've always known him to be a man of character, sharp intellect, artistic instinct, and a deep and authentic faith. He is the real deal, and you can sense that throughout his writing. It was of course great fun for me, then, to hear Seth read this in his own voice -- but I trust that other listeners will find his voice to be as charming, erudite and genuine as the man himself.

Seth writes here, as elsewhere, with unusual vulnerability -- and this invites the reader into an honest introspection of their own. The Book of Waking Up is excellent modern spiritual writing. Aside from delighting in Seth's lucid, poetic, personal, and often humorous writing for its own sake, I enjoyed the theme and divisions and flow of the book; and particularly its development of thought, as he structured it.

If you sense that you may need a greater awakening from the distractions and fog through which you've been walking through life... an awakening to your life itself; to the state of your own soul; and most of all, to the healing and clarifying love of God.... Don't wait. Order a copy of this book, and embrace its invitation to the way of "inner sobriety".

Well-named. Seth's words shook me awake.

Seth's story wakes the reader to life, pain, joy...all the things we so easily numb ourselves to.