The Long Exhale, a YouTube podcast hosted by yoga instructor and writer Clara Ramírez, has released a new episode titled “What a Year of Spiritual Reading Taught Me About How Books Actually Change Us.” The episode is built around the best books about spirituality in 2025, offering both a complete reading list and something rarer: an honest exploration of what spiritual reading actually does to us.
The episode is available now on YouTube and YouTube Music.
The best books about spirituality on YouTube
The best books about spirituality on YouTube Music podcasts
Best Books About Spirituality 2025 – What Changed My Practice This Year (Medium.com)
Best Books About Spirituality 2025 on Substack
More Than a Book List
Most content about the best books about spirituality in 2025 stops at the list. This episode goes further.
The episode opens with a question: is there a book you have returned to after a few years and found it saying something completely different, even though the words are exactly the same? That experience, and what it reveals about how we change as readers, is the thread the whole episode follows.
Clara Ramírez spent 2025 tracking what her reading was actually doing to her, not what the books claimed to offer, and not what she assumed was happening. The episode draws a clear contrast between two ways of reading. Reading to know means accumulating wisdom, underlining passages, feeling like you understand. Reading to practice means returning to the same truths and trying to become them. The difference is subtle, but it changes everything.
“The books that matter most aren’t the ones that give you answers,” Clara says in the episode. “They’re the ones that teach you how to sit with better questions.”
What the Episode Covers
The episode moves through three deep dives after introducing the full list.
A passage that arrived differently the second time. Three years after first reading Thich Nhat Hanh’s writing on breath, Clara returned to the same page after a run along the Göta River in Gothenburg. The words were identical. But this time, she says, she read them with her ribs, not her mind. The book had not changed. She had. That moment is the episode’s anchor.
The book that refused to offer comfort. Maria Vyasa’s Kundalini Baptism of Fire is the most uncomfortable inclusion on the list. Clara is honest about this. “I’m still not sure I like this book,” she says in the episode. “But it changed me, and sometimes that matters more than liking.” The book revealed something Clara had been avoiding: the places in her practice where she had been going through the motions rather than actually showing up.
Reading in two languages. Clara grew up in Barcelona and now lives in Gothenburg, and her spiritual life happens across Spanish and English. Reading Fernando Pessoa in the original Portuguese opened something different than the English translations had. The episode explores what is gained when the same truth arrives in two languages, and what gets lost in the crossing.
About The Long Exhale
The Long Exhale is a YouTube podcast and video series created by Clara Ramírez, a yoga practioner and writer based in Gothenburg, Sweden. Originally from Barcelona, Clara writes at the intersection of embodied spirituality, yoga philosophy, running, and everyday contemplative life.
The show explores what it means to practice, in the fullest sense of that word. Episodes are built around Clara’s personal essays and combine honest reflection with grounded wisdom drawn from yoga philosophy, world literature, and the textures of daily life in Sweden.
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