Interview With Author Hugo Salles
Tell us about yourself and how many books you have written.
I’m a writer, a lawyer, and an executive, from Brazil. I write about Tibetan Buddhist figures as mental tools for very ordinary problems — not devotion, engineering. I have six books in the series “The Technologies of the Awakened Mind,” each built around a single figure and a single knot: fear, guilt, attachment, clarity, anger, and one volume that ties the five together.
The corporate world is where this started for me. It turned out to be an excellent laboratory — a place with enough fear, ego, and pressure per square meter to test every one of these techniques under real load. An awakened mind isn’t awakened in a cave. It’s awakened on a Tuesday, in a meeting that’s going sideways. That’s the mind I write for, because it’s the one I’ve had to work with.
What is the name of your latest book and what inspired it?
Tara — The Tibetan Method for Fear, Anxiety, and Courage.
It started at 2:14 in the morning. That’s the hour fear does its best work — no danger in the room, just a body braced against nothing. I’d read the traditional material on Tara for years, and one night I stopped reading her as a goddess who saves you and started reading her as a procedure someone built, refined over centuries, to do one precise thing with a frightened mind.
That was the inspiration: not a promise that the fear stops, but a method for what to do while it’s here. The book is that method. It doesn’t tell you to be brave. It shows you the mechanism.
Do you have any unusual writing habits?
I use real things — my own things — inside the books. Not invented parables, not tidy composite characters. The actual moment it happened to me, kept specific: the meeting where my voice shook, the fourth coxinha that tasted like a quarter of the first, the hour on the clock. The whole premise of the series is that an awakened mind has to work in daily life, so the raw material has to come from daily life. Mine.
The other habit follows from that: I test every idea against an ordinary weekday. If a teaching only works in a monastery and not in traffic, with your phone buzzing, I cut it before it reaches the page.
What authors, or books have influenced you?
Chögyam Trungpa taught me that you can be devastatingly practical about the sacred without draining it. Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism is the book I keep closest — it’s the whole reason I write Buddhism without incense.
Pema Chödrön and Tara Brach, for the tone: tender and unflinching in the same sentence, which is the hardest thing to do — and for teaching me that you can meet fear without flattering it or fighting it.
What are you working on now?
Two things at once. The English editions of the series, because getting the voice to land in English is its own build — it’s not translation, it’s rebuilding the same machine in another language. And a book called The Five Buddhas of the Mind, which is the synthesis volume: the five figures not as separate gods competing for attention, but as five doors into the same room, opened depending on which lock you’re carrying.
I also run a Substack, Mente Desperta, where I test the ideas in a faster, funnier register before they earn their way into a book.
What is your best method or website when it comes to promoting your books?
The honest answer is that reviews are the hardest and most valuable thing, and there’s no shortcut — you don’t buy your way to a good one. You get them through community. Real interaction, over time, is what earns you ARC readers who actually add something to a review instead of just marking a star.
I got lucky there. I found a handful of remarkable readers — a couple of committed skeptics, a Lutheran or two, people coming from completely different places than mine — and watching them meet these Buddhist tools on their own terms was the best part of the whole process. That’s the real promotion: not a campaign, a conversation. Past that, my site awakenedmindbooks.com and Instagram (@despertabooks), where I teach first and sell almost never.
Do you have any advice for new authors?
Three things that worked for me. Hold a coherent theme — pick the ground you’re standing on and stay on it, so a reader who liked one book knows what the next one is for. Write with authority, which doesn’t mean sounding like an expert; it means only writing what you’ve actually earned the right to say. And build a community, patiently, before you need it.
The rest is craft. Those three are what keep the craft from being shouted into an empty room.
What is the best advice you have ever heard?
That a book describes the water; it doesn’t get you wet.
I end every one of my books by sending the reader away from it — the page is the door, not the road. The best writing advice and the best living advice turned out to be the same thing: don’t confuse understanding a thing with doing it. Understanding is the map. Practice is the road. Nobody ever got anywhere by admiring the map.
What are you reading now?
Sapiens, by Yuval Noah Harari — the long view of what our species actually is, which is oddly steadying when you spend your days writing about a single anxious mind at 2 a.m.
I usually keep a second book going alongside it. Right now the two circling my desk are Becoming Supernatural, by Joe Dispenza, and What Makes You Not a Buddhist, by Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse — the second one is a small, sharp book I recommend to anyone who thinks Buddhism asks them to convert. It doesn’t.
What’s next for you as a writer?
Finishing the English series and getting the physical editions right in Brazil — the object matters to me, the cover, the paper, the way a book sits in a hand.
Longer term, I want the whole collection to work as one thing: six doors, one room. Someone comes in through fear because that’s the lock they’re carrying, and finds the rest of the house waiting. That’s the book behind the books, and it’s what I’m building toward.
If you were going to be stranded on a desert island and allowed to take 3 or 4 books with you what books would you bring?
Trungpa’s Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, because I’d want the reminder not to turn survival into a spiritual performance.
The Tao Te Ching, because it’s short, bottomless, and reads differently every time the tide comes in.
And Tara Brach’s Radical Acceptance, because on an island with nothing else, the ability to stop fighting the moment you’re in is the only survival skill that matters.
I’d leave my own books on the mainland. I already know how they end.
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