Click here to buy this book! Lulu Sheryl Karas Author Website Kindle (Amazon) Nook (Barnes and Noble) Category:  Memoir Publisher: Healing Communication Press ISBN-10:  1257945289 Type: Non-Fiction Pages: 278 Copyright: July 2011 ISBN-13: 9781257945283 Following recession-related mishaps, the story follows a New Age spiritual counseling team from their original home in the beautiful ultra-progressive liberal town of Santa Cruz, CA to the ultra-conservative Republican Mormon community of Snowflake, Arizona. The timing is immediately after the election of Barack Obama and the passage of Proposition 8 (repealing gay marriage in California), and the result is at turns poignant and funny and leads to a spiritual wake-up call that shows the importance of connecting the political and the personal in our task of developing spiritually on the planet. This book might be described as Michael Moore meets Deepak Chopra if the story was told by a female blogger like Julie Powell (Julie, Julia). Combining humor with spiritual insights and a deeply personal awakening of a political sort, the book touches on issues millions of Americans have been going through—losing a job, a business, a home, facing bankruptcy. But it is also a story about choosing to live a creative, purpose-driven life, being guided by faith, and finding one's voice in a world that calls out for an end to polarity, injustice and hate. Ultimately, it is about community and reclaiming one’s connection to the greater whole. Autographed copies of this book are available directly from the authors through Sheryl Karas's author website. You can also get a pdf instant download with full color photographs and artwork there as well. Excerpt The Dixie Chicks and Country Western “Hospitality” (Excerpt) We couldn’t find anything interesting to watch on satellite TV the other day so we looked through Priscilla and Frank’s stash of DVDs and found a very interesting documentary called “Shut Up and Sing!” It was about what happened to the Dixie Chicks when lead singer Natalie Maines made an off-the-cuff comment against President Bush’s invasion of Iraq between songs while performing in London during the anti-war protests occurring there at the time. It was a simple statement: “We do not want this war, this violence, and we’re ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas.” It seems innocuous now, even prescient, but George Bush was close to the height of his popularity at the time and the backlash was extreme. The Dixie Chicks are the most successful female performing group in country music history and, according to their website, the highest selling female group in any genre. They apologized immediately but a wartime Republican president cannot be spoken ill of by the “girls next door” when you’re part of the country music scene. Their apologies were not only thrown back in their faces, they were blacklisted from the country music airwaves from that time on. George Bush went on to be the least popular president in U.S. history but you still can’t hear their music on any radio station we receive in eastern Arizona. I grew up just south of Boston and was in elementary school at the height of the Vietnam War. Massachusetts was a very liberal Democratic community in those days, still is, although after living in Santa Cruz it seems more conservative to me now. Everyone I knew was against the war. I remember watching M.A.S.H. on television and thinking that the Vietnam War protesters were the conscience of the nation. I never heard of the Dixie Chicks before the United States invaded Iraq but the whole country knew who they were after the incident in London and the reason we knew chilled me to the bone. The United States had been attacked on 9-11 by a group of Saudi Arabian terrorists and retaliated by invading two sovereign nations, neither of which were Saudi Arabia. Somehow we wound up in Afghanistan—fool me once? But when we invaded Iraq we knew better than to trust this president, at least everyone I knew in Santa Cruz felt like that. The way the Dixie Chicks were treated shocked me. It was as if they had committed an act of treason, a betrayal that was beyond belief. What on earth was happening here? Watching the movie brought it all back and then I remembered where we are now—-in the middle of conservative Republican Red State America and country music is the only music around. Paul and I have had many discussions since then about this. He doesn’t want me to be prejudiced against the people we meet here. “We have to give this place a chance!” But will they give us a chance? We already worry about what we say in our blogs. How honest can we be here? And how might it affect us?

By David Spangler
“This book is a winner. It has everything a good book should have: suspense, excitement, pathos, joy, laughter—-lots of laughter—and great characters you care about and can genuinely root for! And it's non-fiction! But what it has most is love and wisdom. Profound, heart-opening love and wisdom. It is hands down one of the best books on spirituality and its role in meeting the challenges of our time that I have read. And did I say that it's funny, too? Be good to yourself and read this book. Be good to your friends and buy them a copy.” ~ David Spangler, author of FACING THE FUTURE and SUBTLE WORLDS: AN EXPLORER'S FIELD NOTES.

By Larry Dossy MD
"WAKING UP is a fascinating account of two seekers trying to find sense and sanity in our contemporary world, which often seems deliberately designed to make people crazy. The lessons they learn can help anyone find balance in our chaotic culture." ~ Larry Dossey, MD, author of HEALING WORDS and THE POWER OF PREMONITIONS

By Carol Lynn Pearson
"A charming read! Wouldn’t it be great, I kept thinking as I read WAKING UP IN THE GREAT RECESSION MORMON DESERT, if everyone in the world accidentally found themselves living in the camp of the "other"– a Mormon on Castro Street in San Francisco, a Wall Street executive in a homeless shelter in Louisiana... Thanks, Sheryl, for giving us a glimpse of such an opportunity, for showing us how our deserts can "blossom as the rose." ~ Carol Lynn Pearson, the author of numerous books, notably GOODBYE, I LOVE YOU, the story of her LDS temple marriage to a gay man, NO MORE GOODBYES: CIRCLING THE WAGONS AROUND OUR GAY LOVED ONES, and FACING EAST, a stage play about a Mormon couple dealing with the suicide of their gay son.