A self-professed chocolate cake lover, Geri Larkin brings us The Chocolate Cake Sutra: Ingredients for a Sweet Life that bound to leave you laughing and awed at the same time by the clever nuggets of wisdom you will find inside.
Larkin, who has been practicing meditation for decades, breaks down the recipe for a sweet life into eight essential ingredients: generosity, ethics, tolerance, a capacity to keep going, clearheadedness, a penchant for surprise, an adventurous spirit and wisdom. When skilfully combined, they will help you to rediscover the sacredness of life and live each day with zest and effortless ease.
These eight behaviors aren’t exactly new. I’m sure you have heard or read about some of them at some point in time. But by using her personal experiences as a daughter, mother, Buddhist student and dharma teacher to bring them all together, Larkin brilliantly melts all the ingredients into one delicious cake quite unlike any out there.
Sprinkled with references to modern life and pop cultures (think Yoda and Harry Potter) that you can easily relate to, this book is choked full of surprisingly profound, heartwarming and often amusing spiritual messages which are otherwise dry and unpalatable to most people.
Sugar-free wisdom that energizes nonetheless
You will find lots of inspiring and meaningful anecdotes in The Chocolate Cake Sutra that remind you of the holiness in life. Wisdom and surprises are in every corner if you are willing to pause and listen or observe, as illustrated in one of following accounts:
Wisdom is Everywhere
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“Yesterday the man who runs the color printer at the copy shop gave me the best advice ever about getting through my next job hunt. ‘Don’t worry,’ John told me. ‘Spend four months enjoying your life. Slow down. It is the best time ever. Then about three months before you really need to work, start looking. There will be something right there for you. God takes care of us.’ Wow. And I thought I was just there for twelve copies of a photograph.”
Laced with direct and powerful take-home messages from beginning to end, I’m tempted to write down every jewel I can find in this book. But since this is clearly not in the interest of the author, I shall only list a few selected ones:
Life as an Adventure
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“Giving yourself permission to be an adventurer — whatever that means to you — feeds you in the deepest way possible. You will be energized. Wisdom grows out of your experiences. So does compassion.”
Yoda’s Wisdom
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“Compassionate detachment is where Yoda was aiming me. Doing my best without being caught in outcomes. Doing my best when it may not solve the problem. Doing my best and then letting go when there clearly isn’t anything else I can do.”
Finding Happiness
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“…finding happiness in the day-to-day life we’ve been given is surprisingly, embarrassingly, simple. Why? Because it is available the instant we allow our senses to take in the surroundings, the views, the moments, smells, and tastes that we completely miss out on when we are too busy listing all the reasons why we weren’t happy.”
The forgotten ingredients for happiness
The ingredients for happiness are not stuff available in a grocery shop or a mall. In fact, we don’t even need to look beyond ourselves to find them. They are already inside of us but are plainly forgotten when we are busy chasing after external happiness. We just need to be reminded of them often so that they can take roots in our heart. And The Chocolate Cake Sutra serves this purpose well.
But don’t expect to bake a tasty chocolate cake on your first try. Unless you are an enlightened master chef, I suspect most of us need to constantly bring our full presence back to every moment in life. So it is a good idea to re-read this book and pick up new ingredients that you might have missed in your first reading like the way I did.
Because given the right attention and nurture, these ingredients will ultimately combine and react, as if by magic, to create one delicious life for you.
