Book Review: Loving, Happy, Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise by Steven Ernest Morrow

Loving, Happy, Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise: A Spiritual Blueprint to Unlocking Life’s Miracles by Steven Ernest Morrow is a warm, earnest, and openly devotional entry in the New Thought tradition of spiritual self-help. Its central claim is stated plainly on the first page and returned to in every chapter: you can improve your life by shifting your consciousness.

Morrow’s organizing distinction is between what he calls human-consciousness — the ego-driven state in which we try to control everything ourselves — and God-consciousness, a state of trust, presence, and “Seeking the Kingdom” in which, he argues, miracles, abundance, and well-being flow naturally. Readers familiar with Ernest Holmes, the Centers for Spiritual Living, or teachers in the Religious Science lineage will recognize the intellectual ancestry immediately; Morrow wears it openly, quoting Holmes, Marcus Aurelius, Ram Dass, and Dr. Roger Teel alongside a generous helping of Instagram spirituality accounts.

The book’s structure builds methodically. An introduction frames the premise and, in one of its most welcoming touches, explicitly invites readers to swap out the word “God” for Energy, Nature, the Creator, or whatever term feels resonant — a gesture of inclusivity that sets a generous tone.

From there the chapters move through becoming a “cocreator” of your life, the idea that whatever happens to you happens through you, the cultivation of a “having-consciousness” and abundance mindset, the practice of meditation, the Divine Plan (Morrow’s attempt to reconcile predestiny with free will), reincarnation and soul contracts, and finally a chapter on the mind-body relationship covering sleep, nutrition, movement, relationships, trauma, and aging. It closes with Morrow’s personal mantra — to live in a Loving, Happy, Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise way — and an afterword built entirely from a viral social-media post about the nature of religion.

By a wide margin, the strongest and most affecting part of the book is Morrow’s own story, told across the first chapter. It is genuinely vulnerable and well-paced. He married at twenty-two, only to discover, via a romantic card left on the kitchen table, that his wife was unfaithful; the rawest moment in the book is his account of running several miles through the streets in his suit pants and dress shoes, mind overwhelmed, until his body gave out for two days afterward.

That pain drove him to meditation, and a notice at his church led him to a retreat at Jackson Lake Lodge in the Grand Tetons, where he met Reverend Al Heard – a Religious Science minister forty-plus years his senior who became his mentor, teacher, and dearest friend.

Morrow’s description of the euphoric, want-dissolving state he entered for roughly six months to a year afterward (which he later connects to the “Agna,” or third-eye chakra) is the book’s spiritual high point, and he is admirably honest about what followed: the slow creep of ego — what he memorably calls “Edging God Out” — the top-of-the-line Saab Turbo, the overreaching attempt to launch his own health club, a business partner’s fraud that cost him everything, and, devastatingly, the Reverend’s sudden death. The image of Morrow sitting on his late mentor’s bed, holding his hand and whispering “Hey Buddy” over and over — the Reverend’s own affectionate greeting — is the emotional anchor of the entire book, and it earns its weight.

When Morrow writes from lived experience, the book sings. The memoir is specific, humble, and moving, and his account of losing his spiritual high to complacency is a genuinely useful caution against treating peace as a possession. The practical material is also serviceable: a sample gratitude meditation, concrete practices for cultivating gratitude and generosity, habit-formation steps, and the recurring encouragement to start with “baby steps” give readers something to actually do rather than merely contemplate.

Where the book asks more of the reader is in its metaphysics, and a fair review should be clear about what’s on offer. Morrow presents reincarnation, pre-birth soul contracts, karmic rebalancing, the conscious responsiveness of the universe, and even the meaning of angel number 1111 not as speculation but as the architecture of reality.

These are matters of faith and personal resonance rather than demonstrable fact, and readers outside the New Thought worldview should know that going in; those inside it will likely find the chapters affirming and thoughtfully argued. To his credit, Morrow handles the most sensitive territory with care — his passage on those who die by suicide is notably compassionate, framed around mercy rather than judgment, and he repeatedly cautions against using the soul-contract lens to blame anyone for their suffering.

That caution matters because the book’s core premise carries a well-known tension that surfaces most sharply in the health material. The insistence that “things are not happening to you, they are happening through you” is empowering when aimed at habits and attitudes, but it edges toward self-blame when extended to illness, poverty, or victimization — the implication that a sufficiently elevated consciousness would resolve them.

Morrow clearly intends empowerment, not condemnation, and he softens the edges, but the tension is real and readers will feel it. The book is also unusually reliant on social-media epigraphs; quotes attributed to Instagram handles do a lot of the citational heavy lifting, which lends parts of it the feel of a curated feed and sits oddly beside the genuine wisdom-tradition sources. A couple of rough edges remain, too: a typo on the copyright page (“Spiritual Bluprint”), and an afterword consisting entirely of a quoted viral post arguing that organized religion was invented to control people — a pointed, anti-institutional note that may jar the churchgoing, scripture-quoting readers the rest of the book seems happy to welcome.

Taken on its own terms — as a sincere, openhearted spiritual memoir wrapped around a New Thought framework – Loving, Happy, Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise succeeds at what it sets out to do. It is heartfelt rather than rigorous, inspirational rather than evidentiary, and its real treasure is the author himself: a man willing to lay out his own ego, failure, and grief so that others might recognize their own capacity for change. For readers drawn to mind-body-spirit titles, meditation, and the teaching that a shift in inner orientation can reshape an outer life, Morrow offers a warm and personal companion.

Rating: ★★★★½

Verdict: Loving, Happy, Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise by Steven Ernest Morrow is a sincere and openhearted spiritual self-help book anchored by a genuinely moving personal memoir — especially the author’s relationship with his mentor, Reverend Al Heard. Familiar in its New Thought framework and leaning heavily on social-media sourcing, it is best read as inspiration rather than instruction, but for its intended audience of spiritually open readers, its warmth and vulnerability make it a rewarding companion.