I'd love to have someone beta-read my spiritual memoir 'Chasing Happiness' which covers about 16 years of my life (along with some flashbacks). It's about 90,000 words. It's about my struggle with a very strict spiritual path for 15 years which I finally left for Mahayana Buddhism in 2014. I took the bodhisattva vows from His Holiness The Dalai Lama in Dec. 2014. I am willing to read in return. I belong to the IWW but it's difficult for readers to get a hold on a novel piecemeal. Here are the first few paragraphs to give you an idea:
For fifteen years I walked on thin ice in my pursuit of happiness.
I wanted enlightenment – eternal happiness.
The main reason for this aspiration was my father. My Japanese gurus in the Maitreya Buddha Temple promised that if I attained enlightenment, my parents and ancestors would automatically be enlightened.
As ‘The Wild Child of Bangalore’, I had not been a good daughter to my father who had refused to remarry after divorcing my mother when I was fifteen years old. He had chosen a life of loneliness so we would not have to deal with a stepmother. He had made many sacrifices for me and my sister Vinita.
And yet, I was cruel to my father. Always getting into scrapes over boys, always looking in the wrong places for the affection mother had denied me – as father often rued.
I got suspended in high school for jumping the compound wall of the hostel to watch a movie, expelled from college in Darjeeling for running away from the hostel at night to meet a boyfriend, and once again, expelled from a finishing school in Madras for dating someone from the IIT there.
“You can finish where your mother left off so I can end my life in misery,” he told me once after I had planned to run away with my boyfriend. I was sixteen then. In my twenties, I returned home late one night and found him waiting up for me as usual. He would just look at me sadly and go up to his room and lock himself in. But that night he told me, “At this rate, don’t expect your father to last long.”
Although his words seared through me, I soon forgot them and went on with my wild fashion-model life of partying, smoking joints and man-eating. My revealing clothes caused my father great anguish. He caught me once stealing away, dressed in a red halter top and jeans and threatened to burn my clothes. After that I carried my sexy attire with me.