Barron Steffen, author of The Final Gift Of The Beloved, is himself a widower. (2020, back cover) Before founding The Yoga Mindset he taught elementary school, surfed, studied yoga and spirituality, and was an Italian pop singer. Such a varied background has grounded him in his teaching at The Yoga Mindset where he is a proponent of mastering your thoughts so they do not master you.

The book is divvied up into thirteen (13) days and moves between the present and the future. It opens with him at a meditation conference where he receives a phone call from the police telling him that his wife has been in a fatal car crash. Can anyone ever be prepared for that moment? He is naturally devastated and operating on sheer adrenalin. He gets out of his car and somehow completes his classes. He desperately tries to find homeostasis and something to give him hope that this is all some kind of sad mistake. 

His yoga training has prepared him to quiet his mind and look inward. Can he? In this moment he says “I tried to gather myself inwardly. It felt like I was no longer in my physical body, and I absolutely knew why. I was at the pujari on the day of my beloved’s death.” (2020, p.23)

A friend from Italy called one day inviting him to an Ashram in India. He went. He stayed for forty (40) days. He says “The most truthful thing I can say is that something of life-changing significance happened to me there, and in the wake of the court’s decision I was wide open to it. It was almost as if I were a freshly plowed field, and razed to the ground by the judge’s verdict, whatever new seed was sewn met no obstacle, since nothing else was present to compete for sunlight and water.” (2020, p.30)

On day two he wakes to be reminded that his wife’s death was not a bad dream, but a reality that he will live with for the rest of his life. He tried meditation and found it rather unfulfilling for the first time in a long while. 

As the days move onward and he plans for her final swan song he finds inner peace by taking the words of his Swamiji. To which he adds, “That very thing that had crushed me, the disappearance of my beloved, had now become my guide.” (2020, p.80)

One of the most important take aways from this book is the advice from his Swamiji. “Slow down, listen, be here now.” (2020, p.83) I have actually been practicing a bit of this myself and it has helped to calm me down and become grounded.