Our Bad Choices
A Wake-Up Call for Anyone Who Thinks They’re the Only One Paying the Price
We rarely see the full impact of our decisions while we’re making them. In the moment, we justify. We defend. We act out of emotion, fear, pride, or pain. We think we’re only hurting ourselves—or we don’t think at all. But somewhere down the line, after the dust settles, we start to notice the quieter casualties. The friend who went silent. The child who stopped trusting. The partner who stayed, but stopped hoping. This book is not about reliving shame. It’s about finally seeing what we couldn’t before—and choosing to grow from it. Read More
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Jamie Michele –
Keith Thorn’s No Mud: No Lotus uses the metaphor of mud to describe difficult life experiences such as grief, loss, burnout, and depression, which often precede healing or renewal. He argues that cultural habits encourage avoiding pain, but meaningful change requires fully experiencing discomfort rather than resisting it.
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Charlie Ryan –
No Mud. No Lotus is a profoundly uplifting book that redefines how we look at life’s hardest seasons. I was especially struck by the way you weave the metaphor of mud, grief, burnout, and loss, into the quiet, enduring beauty of the lotus, reminding us that renewal is not just possible but ongoing. Your reflections on stillness, mindful breathing, and journaling are not only practical but deeply compassionate, offering readers a path toward rooting, developing the unseen strength to face life’s unpredictability with patience and grace. I found your conversational tone especially powerful; it feels less like reading a book and more like sitting with a trusted friend who knows when to guide and when simply to listen.
Bryn Cathedral –
I just finished No Mud: No Lotus, and I was truly struck by the clarity and compassion in your voice. The way you frame grief, loss, and burnout as fertile “mud” that allows the lotus of healing to bloom again and again is both inspiring and deeply reassuring. I especially admired how your conversational style makes profound insights feel as natural and grounding as talking with a trusted friend.
Cynthia S. Beauchamp –
From the metaphor of mud to the majesty of the lotus, this is no ordinary self-help book. No Mud: No Lotus doesn’t just offer advice, it reshapes how we experience suffering, renewal, and growth. The blend of mindfulness, radical presence, and practical compassion had me deeply engaged, and your discussion of rooting, the unseen process of building inner stability, is profoundly resonant. The tone felt like a trusted friend guiding you through life’s hardest seasons.
Elvira A. Lopez –
I just finished No Mud: No Lotus, and I’m still reflecting on the layered wisdom it carries.
From surrendering to discomfort to cultivating rootedness, this is no ordinary self-help book. Your use of the mud-lotus metaphor doesn’t just illustrate healing, it reframes how we experience life’s hardest seasons. The blend of mindful breathing, stillness, and journaling practices had me grounded, and the steady progression from grief and burnout to renewal felt both authentic and attainable. And your treatment of blooming, not as a single event, but as a continual cycle? Completely fresh and deeply moving.
Jane Hancock –
No Mud. No Lotus. is such a deeply reflective and empowering work—it doesn’t just offer encouragement, it creates a pathway for transformation.
Through your blend of poetic storytelling, vulnerable truth, and sacred wisdom, you’ve given readers a guide to move from pain into purpose, from brokenness into bloom.
The message that struggle is the soil for growth resonates profoundly in today’s world, where so many are seeking meaning in the midst of hardship.
Patricia Smith –
No Mud: No Lotus is a profound and uplifting guide that re-frames life’s difficulties, grief, burnout, loss, and depression not as barriers but as the fertile “mud” from which healing and renewal arise. With wisdom and compassion, you invite readers to embrace discomfort rather than resist it, reminding us that the lotus blooms not once, but again and again.
Through practices like stillness, mindful breathing, and honest journaling, you illuminate a path toward what you call rooting, the gradual, often unseen growth of inner stability. Rooted individuals meet life’s challenges with calmness and clarity, allowing healing to unfold as a series of subtle shifts instead of dramatic transformations.
Réal Laplaine –
No Mud No Lotus, by Keith Thorn, is a beautifully written memoir about the author’s struggle to rise up from the depths of grief and loss and to find not only happiness, but peace. The prose in this book is really quite magnificent, and through colorful and lucid metaphors and simply beautiful composition, the author relates his story, showing us an entirely different perspective about dealing with loss, grief and depression. We see, through his eyes, that falling into the mire, the mud, the lower depths of existence, that in that state is where the roots of recovery and growth are seeded. Thorn presents us with a perspective about life which makes living and experiencing happiness, but also the diametric opposite – part of the process of growth and that being honest with oneself, facing the reality of one’s unhappiness, grief or depression, is the first step to planting the seeds for rebirth. There were so many beautiful quotations, but these two provide a small taste of it:
“We’re told a story; if you do everything right, life will be tidy. But life isn’t tidy. It’s honest.”
“…Beauty is not the absence of struggle. It is what is born because of it.”
Highly recommended – a pleasurable and insightful read.