By: Jaxon Lee
In a world where many people feel overwhelmed, divided, spiritually tired, or quietly unsure of where they belong, Finding Our Way Back to What We Are offers a gentle invitation to pause, reflect, and return to something deeper. Written by Rick Gregory, a certified Spiritual Life Coach, former pastor, recovery mentor, writer, and host of The Awakened Collective podcast, the book speaks to seekers, questioners, people in recovery, and anyone longing to rediscover a sense of love beyond fear.
Rather than offering rigid answers or asking readers to accept a specific belief system, Gregory’s new daily reflection book creates space for honesty, healing, and remembering. It explores the possibility that people are not here to become something new, but to remember what has always been true beneath fear, shame, conditioning, self-judgment, and separation.
A Yearlong Companion for Reflection and Remembering
Finding Our Way Back to What We Are is structured as a yearlong journey, with each month opening a different doorway into awareness. The book moves through themes such as thought, honesty, forgiveness, compassion, oneness, surrender, grace, healing, gratitude, and love in action. Each day includes a reflection, a grounding analogy, a guiding quote, a question for contemplation, and a journaling space titled What I’m Noticing Today.
This format allows readers to move slowly, one reflection at a time. It is not a book designed to be rushed or completed quickly. Instead, it invites readers to live with each idea, carry it into ordinary moments, and notice what it awakens within them.
At its heart, the book is built around the word LOVE, used in a broad and inclusive spiritual sense. Gregory presents LOVE not merely as an emotion, but as the source from which life arises and the truth to which people remain connected, even when they forget. This makes the book accessible to readers from many backgrounds, including those who still value faith, those healing from religious pain, and those who feel spiritually curious but uncertain.
A Message for the Spiritually Tired and the Quietly Searching
Many readers today are not looking for another doctrine. They are looking for a place to breathe. Some have been hurt by fear-based religious language, exclusion, shame, or rigid expectations. Others still long for spiritual connection but no longer feel at home within the beliefs they once inherited.
Gregory writes directly into that space. His message is not forceful. It is invitational. The book does not ask readers to prove, perform, or perfect themselves. It asks them to pause long enough to consider a different possibility: perhaps they were never broken. Perhaps the love they have been seeking has been closer than they imagined.
Throughout the book, Gregory returns to a central idea that is both simple and deeply moving. Much of human suffering grows from the belief in separation. Separation from others. Separation from life. Separation from the Divine. Separation from one’s own worth. These reflections gently question that belief and invite readers to explore what might change if belonging were not something to earn, but something to remember.
Rick Gregory’s Journey from Certainty to Love
The emotional depth of the book is rooted in Gregory’s own life. His path has included ministry, spiritual study, love, grief, addiction, recovery, questioning, deconstruction, and the slow rediscovery of a more compassionate understanding of God and self.
After a profound spiritual experience at nineteen, Gregory entered years of religious study and eventually served as a pastor. During that time, he sincerely believed that the answers he sought could be found through doctrine, scripture, and spiritual discipline. Yet from a very early age, he also knew he was gay. For years, he lived with the belief that something about him needed to change in order to be acceptable to God.
Eventually, after years of struggle, prayer, self-denial, marriage, and children, Gregory came to a life-changing realization: God loved him exactly as he was. That realization led him to leave his marriage and the pastorate and begin reexamining many of the beliefs he had once held tightly.
That search deepened after the death of his first husband, Kevin. Following a work-related injury, Kevin endured multiple surgeries and lived with chronic pain. When he ran out of his prescribed pain medication before his refill arrived, he accepted medication from a neighbor, believing it was similar to what he had been taking. Tragically, it was not. The medication was a time-release form of morphine, and Kevin died in his sleep from respiratory failure.
The loss shattered Gregory. His drinking escalated, grief consumed him, and the beliefs that had once provided certainty could no longer hold the questions he was facing. Recovery became the beginning of a different kind of spiritual awakening, one grounded less in fear and more in honesty, awareness, compassion, surrender, and a God of his own understanding.
Love, Recovery, and the Courage to Begin Again
Recovery reshaped Gregory’s life. It taught him that lasting change begins with honesty, openness, and willingness. It showed him that responsibility is not about blaming oneself for everything that has happened, but about reclaiming the power to respond differently. It taught him that surrender is not defeat, and that even the most painful chapters can become part of a larger story of healing and service.
Gregory later met his husband, Glen, whose presence and love became a profound part of his continued spiritual journey. One of the last notes Kevin ever wrote to Gregory now lives on his arm as a tattoo. Years later, when Glen read those words, he told Gregory, “God has answered this prayer twice.” For Gregory, that moment carried the quiet certainty of home.
Together, Rick and Glen have walked through recovery, spiritual questioning, growth, and the ongoing work of learning to love themselves and others more freely. Their relationship has helped Gregory understand that unconditional love is not something people find outside themselves. It is something they remember and then choose to extend.
A Book That Invites, Rather Than Instructs
One of the most distinctive qualities of Finding Our Way Back to What We Are is its refusal to tell readers what to believe. Gregory knows what it is to live inside certainty. He also knows what it is to have certainty challenged by life, grief, recovery, and love.
Because of that, the book does not speak from a pedestal. It speaks like a companion walking beside the reader. Its reflections are grounded in everyday life: conversations, relationships, emotions, doubts, pauses, disappointments, acts of kindness, and the small moments where awareness quietly begins.
Gregory’s approach is especially meaningful for people who feel spiritually homeless. He understands the ache of wanting connection while feeling wounded by the very language that once promised belonging. He understands what it means to be welcomed conditionally. He also understands the healing that begins when love is allowed to become larger than fear.
Why This Book May Resonate Now
At a time when many people are more connected digitally yet increasingly lonely, Finding Our Way Back to What We Are offers a slower and more compassionate way of seeing. It reminds readers that awakening does not always arrive through dramatic transformation. Sometimes it appears in a pause before reaction, a moment of self-compassion, a willingness to forgive, or the simple recognition that one does not have to keep fighting life to be worthy of peace.
The book may resonate with readers navigating grief, transition, recovery, spiritual questioning, religious wounds, or quiet inner change. It does not promise that life will become easy. It offers something more honest: companionship, perspective, and the reminder that nothing essential has been lost.
For Gregory, the message is deeply personal. As he has said, “I write to share the things I most want to remember.” Through this book, he offers those reminders to anyone who may need them.
About Rick Gregory
Rick Gregory is a certified Spiritual Life Coach, former pastor, recovery mentor, writer, and host of The Awakened Collective podcast. His work is shaped by years of spiritual study, lived experience, recovery principles, contemplative practice, and a lifelong search for a more loving and inclusive understanding of spirituality.
Through his writing, coaching, podcasting, and recovery work, Gregory helps create spaces where people can question, heal, grow, and reconnect with what feels true within themselves. His work centers on awareness, forgiveness, compassion, oneness, healing, love, and the belief that awakening is not about becoming someone new, but remembering who we have always been.
Stay connected with Rick Gregory and explore his work through:
Website: The Awakened Collective
Facebook: Rick Gregory on Facebook
Instagram: @frederickwgregory
YouTube: Rick Gregory on YouTube
