INTRODUCTION

       The most auspicious moment of your life is when you make the commitment to know the Truth, a commitment so firm there is no turning back.

      GURUMAYI CHIDVILASANANDA

      Imagine a life in which you woke up every morning excited about the day ahead and certain that, when you went to sleep at night, you would be able to say, “This was a great day!” …

      Imagine knowing that no matter what challenges you faced in your relationships, your work, or your family, you would always remain centered, calm, and clear …

      Imagine having a source of confidence and wisdom inside yourself that you could count on to be a constant wellspring of strength and inspiration …

      Imagine what it would be like if you knew exactly what you needed to do to make each and every moment of your life one of great happiness, great contentment, and great peace …

      The experiences I describe here aren’t simply impossible dreams—they are possible, very attainable realities. They paint a picture of a life that, perhaps, has only existed as a dream you’re sure could never come true. But it can. I wrote this book to help you create that kind of life for yourself, a life that feels like it is working, like it makes sense, and, most importantly, a life in which you are living and loving as the powerful, fulfilled person you’ve always wanted to be.

      This book is about something every one of us seeks in our heart—true freedom, inner freedom, the kind that saints and mystics have written about throughout the ages. This kind of freedom is not the freedom to acquire more of what you can eventually lose, or to experience more of what will eventually change, or to do more of what will eventually not matter. Instead, it’s the freedom that comes from knowing how to discover your own state of joy and contentment and protect it from all of life’s ups and downs. It’s the freedom that comes from knowing how to build a center of emotional and spiritual self-reliance on the inside, a center that will allow you to live every day with greater joy, greater strength, and greater peace. Most of all, it’s the freedom that comes from finding a source of security and happiness inside yourself, happiness that nothing and no one can ever take away from you.

      Ever since I can remember, I have been a seeker of this inner freedom. I’ve been on a conscious and committed journey trying to discover the truths about life that would help me make sense of my existence and get the most out of my time here on earth. At the age of eighteen, I found my first spiritual guide and since then, I’ve had the privilege of studying with many great and revered teachers and immersing myself in the knowledge and practices of the world’s most ancient spiritual traditions.

      Secrets About Life Every Woman Should Know contains the most important lessons about life that I have learned during my own profoundly transformative emotional and spiritual odyssey of the last thirty years. And even though the information in this book has been growing patiently and persistently inside of me for all this time, I couldn’t have written it ten years ago, five years ago, even two years ago. Like a soup that you know still needs to simmer just a little bit more, this book needed these last twenty-four months of my life to add the final flavor. Now it’s ready, and it is my privilege and great joy to be able to offer it to you.

      All of us spend our lives searching, consciously or unconsciously, for lasting fulfillment. We make hundreds of decisions every day, from what to eat for breakfast to what CD to listen to in the car to how hard to work on a project to whom we fall in love with, based on what we think will make us happier, what will create a greater sense of security, what will provide us with more of the things we tell ourselves we need to feel successful and complete. Most of these decisions are an attempt to master, or at least cope with, the outer world. This is where we put our energies—trying to get what we want and keep everything under control.

      In spite of our best efforts, in spite of how hard we try to get everything to turn out the way we want it to, a strange things happens: our hopes and dreams keep bumping into reality. We have a picture of how we always thought our lives should be, but if we are really honest with ourselves, we have to admit that our lives look very different from that picture. And so we suffer, because what is happening is different from what we think should be happening, because we are feeling something different from what we think