Zen, Soul, and the Spiritual Life.

Available on Indiebound and Amazon.

Reviews of The Light Inside The Dark

“John Tarrant’s subject is the unbearable lightness of being but also its inconsolable heaviness, and his thinking about the relation between these two poles of spirit and soul is extraordinarily rich. He inoculates one against the wish for a quick fix in the spiritual or imaginative life. His work is useful to poets in the way Bachelard’s Poetics of Space or Hyde’s The Gift is useful.”

— Robert Hass, former Poet Laureate of the United States

“Simply the best book that I have read in the past ten years. The Light Inside the Dark cuts through the many contemporary illusions about the journey which is a life and offers a compass that can guide us to our true home. I want to give it to everyone I know.”

— Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D., author of
Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories that Heal

“An exquisite book which welcomes you in its arms and carries your deepest longings and loves with the lyrical voice of a nightingale. This is one of the best guides yet to the breaking open of the human heart, to vulnerability, eternal spirit, and the mountains dancing.”

— Jack Kornfield, author of
A Path with Heart

“Drawing on his experience as a psychotherapist, poet, and teacher of Zen Buddhism, John Tarrant weaves a rich tapestry of the contradictory and often paradoxical themes of existence. His insights on the soul’s journey are unsparingly frank and oddly comforting.”

— Andrew Weil, M.D., author of
Why Our Health Matters:
A Vision of Medicine That Can Transform Our Future

“John Tarrant offers us a way to gain access to the irrepressible seeds of hope which lie barren, yet ready to bloom, in fallow, and dark times. He does this by stretching the imagination of the Western mind to include for soul’s sake not only its own stories of Greek gods and goddesses, the great fathers of the Hebrew Bible, and the redemption possible in Jesus’s life, but also the great teachings of Zen Buddhist masters and the best spiritual exercises of the East.”

— Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Ph.D., author of
Women Who Run with the Wolves,
The Gift of Story, and
The Faithful Gardener

“This book invites superlatives. It is an exquisite mapping of the Buddhist and totally beyond Buddhist path of liberation, done with the lightest of touches, with perfect grace and clarity and warmth of heart, in a way that makes it so human, and so compelling, that it shows this path, and the work/play of meditation, to be nothing less than life itself, the human condition, offering anyone and everyone the actualities, the shadows, the blossoms, and the boundless, ever-present possibilities of a life lived in awareness, with nothing holding.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn, author of
Wherever You Go, There You Are;
co-author of
Everyday Blessings: The Inner Work of Mindful Parenting