When life unravels, what remains may yet delight. Kira Higgs had a promising career, a welcoming home, carefully tended relationships; by all conventional measures she had mastered the art of life. But when she notices cracks in the foundation, she embarks on a very different one that dismantles what she thought she knew, and reveals something deeper in the process. A Memoir of Sacred Longings in Secular Life is about how spiritual growth rarely presents itself in the form we expect. A driven and curious child, a young Higgs received unfulfilling answers to what seemed a simple how can we truly know there’s such a thing as a god, beyond taking it on faith? So began a lifelong pursuit to understand the true nature of things—both visible and unseen. Even when she set certain questions aside, life-altering events fueled her curiosity. Secularity soon met spirituality. Through meditation practices that quietly opened inner doorways, encounters that stretched the boundaries of perception, and the patient surrender of identities she once clung to, Higgs discovers how the simplest truths can be the most profound, and how our perceptions of reality change when we remove the blinders of convention. This is a memoir about long-term inner work, and the slow integration of a spiritual life within a demanding professional one. It’s a book of experiences, not moments that shifted perceptions, broke patterns, and revealed deeper layers of reality. It reveals how inner change actually not through a single watershed moment or dramatic revelation, but through small, cumulative pivots. It explores meditation not as a prescription but as a laboratory. Some encounters open the door to deeper awareness; others dismantle parts of the identity that no longer work. There’s no doctrine, no dogma, just an exploration of seeing clearly, letting go of unhelpful structures, and navigating life with more attention and less resistance. It’s about integrating the inner and outer life, the contemplative and the worldly, the self that strives and the self that listens; a divide that many, including Higgs, have struggled with. But through her lived example, she shares how these two halves can combine to create a life shaped by the leading of the spirit. With gentle humor and hard-won wisdom, Winnowing invites readers to reconsider that which feels like loss as a key that unlocks transformation.