Summersdale, 2017                                                             

ISBN 978-1-84953-960-9

 

Reviewed by Peter Quince
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This is a brave and inspirational book.  Emma Slade lays her life bare, both the pleasures and the pains.  She is a successful businesswoman, but following a horrifying confrontation with a gunman, she radically reassesses her life and suffers years of PTSD.

Banking leaves something missing: ‘I hadn’t managed to be happy being me yet.’  So she searches for a more fulfilling, spiritual life.  She restlessly switches from Cambridge University to Goldsmiths College.

Her father’s death from lung cancer devastates her. Grief-stricken, she takes a job as a carer, then begins a phased return to banking, but soon realises that it does not afford her ‘a more meaningful life’.  On the Greek island of Skyros she discovers yoga: ‘I loved it,’ she says.  She globetrots, going to Maui and then New Mexico, immersing herself in yoga.  She tells us, ‘my mind was once again beginning to lean towards the philosophy of serenity I had seen as a child’.

She questions herself: ‘Am I good enough?’  She suffers from ‘boom-bust thought patterns’.  The PTSD keeps resurfacing.  She asks herself whether she needs a ‘soul-mate’.  She’s 34, childless, but the simple, spiritual life militates against motherhood.  She develops an all-consuming relationship, but complications arise.  ‘I knew I had messed up,’ she says.  And then Emma discovers the fulfilment afforded by Buddhism.

She visits the Kagyu Samye Ling Tibetan monastery in Scotland and formally becomes a Buddhist.  Approaching the age of 39, her body is telling her, ‘Have a baby now’.  She leaves her partner, declaring, ‘No marriage, no baby, no house, no point’.

After another return to banking and another failed relationship, she discovers that she is pregnant.  In 2006 ‘Oscar’ is born, his Nordic name meaning ‘Spear of God’.  Now she must juggle professional life with motherhood.  She admits, ‘the first months of caring for Oscar had been like boot camp workouts’.  She ponders on the incompatibility of motherhood and the spiritual life.

Her first trip to Bhutan becomes life-changing.  She becomes aware of the supreme importance of kindness, of service to others, and Bhutan’s unique adoption of ‘Gross National Happiness’ as the measure of wellbeing.

Emma is asked if she will teach yoga in Bhutan whilst Oscar stays in England with his father.  She encounters a charismatic Lama.  When she leaves Bhutan she is determined to find him.  She goes back, finds him, and tells us, ‘I felt absolute joy at being near this person’, and declares, ‘He was to be my teacher’.  In Set Free she tells us of her unswerving commitment to Buddhism, claiming that ‘enlightenment’ is ‘impossible to describe in a book!’

Emma shaves her head, telling us that ‘for a Buddhist a shaven head has great significance’.  She meets a ‘rinpoche’ who bestows her with the name ‘Ana Pema Deki’ (Blissful Lotus).  The Lama who teaches Emma baulks at her asking ‘too many questions’, but she desires to know all she can about her chosen path.

All this while she has Oscar to consider, whom she loves deeply and it must have caused her considerable soul-searching whenever she visited Bhutan without him.  She writes, ‘The notion of parenthood as a valid part of a spiritual path remains one for debate’, but more positively she tells us, ‘becoming a nun has enabled me to fully come alive and be a far kinder person’.  Emma’s life-long vows imply a devotion to ‘ahimsa’, the practice of non-violence and compassion.

A friend suggests she writes a book, but she considers this an ‘act of ego’.  She consults Lama about producing a book to help fundraising in Bhutan.  His positive response is, ‘It’s good.  Inspire others.  Do it’.

This book is a great achievement, an example to us all; and anyone who buys their own copy will know that they are contributing to Emma’s vision of a healthier and happier Bhutan.

Whether you wear high heels or go barefoot; whether you wear haute couture or Buddhist robes; whether your head is adorned with golden locks or shaven – the path of enlightenment and help for those in dire need is open to you, as Emma Slade so movingly demonstrates in Set Free.