I’m a physical therapist, certified yoga therapist, and Hakomi practitioner who has spent over twenty-five years helping people heal from physical and emotional pain through the integration of yoga, mindfulness and western medicine. My passion for this topic comes from my own transformation—moving through trauma and burnout into a life guided by mindfulness, movement, and compassion. I’ve seen again and again that presence is the medicine that changes everything. Writing and teaching about this path feels like offering others the same lifeline that once saved me.
I love the way Elizabeth Gilbert writes about surrender and holds nothing back in her confessions.
Her language is fluid, alive, honest, and forgiving. I connected deeply with her exploration of loss and letting go—the sense that life’s current, if trusted, carries us exactly where we need to go.
What moved me most was her unflinching honesty about sex and love addiction. She doesn’t try to appear perfect or heroic; she allows herself to be fully human. That raw vulnerability—her willingness to tell the truth even when it’s messy—is exactly what makes her work so transformative and what continues to inspire my own path as a writer and healer.
"A delicious mashup of narrative that's by turns harrowing and healing." –People
“Entertaining, insightful, wrenching ... punch-to-the-gut powerful.” –The Washington Post
“A blockbuster: brutally honest, lurid, transcendent, and compelling...Gilbert is undoubtedly a force.” —Boston Globe
In her first nonfiction book in a decade, the #1 bestselling writer who taught millions of readers to live authentically (Eat Pray Love) and creatively (Big Magic) shows how to break free.
In 2000, Elizabeth Gilbert met Rayya. They became friends, then best friends, then inseparable. When tragedy entered their lives, the truth was finally…
This book met me in one of the darkest seasons of my life after my second divorce.
Pema Chödrön’s voice feels like a steady heartbeat—calm, wise, and utterly human. She doesn’t promise to remove pain; she invites us to stay present with it. Every page taught me that courage isn’t the absence of fear but the willingness to face it with open eyes and a soft heart.
I return to this book whenever I need to remember that groundlessness is not failure; it can be the greatest freedom.
Pema Choedroen reveals the vast potential for happiness, wisdom and courage even in the most painful circumstances.
Pema Choedroen teaches that there is a fundamental opportunity for happiness right within our reach, yet we usually miss it - ironically, while we are caught up in attempt to escape pain and suffering.
This accessible guide to compassionate living shows us how we can use painful emotions to cultivate wisdom, compassion and courage, ways of communication that lead to openness and true intimacy with others, practices for reversing our negative habitual patterns, methods for working with chaotic situations and ways to cultivate…
Gifts from a Challenging Childhood
by
Jan Bergstrom,
Learn to understand and work with your childhood wounds. Do you feel like old wounds or trauma from your childhood keep showing up today? Do you sometimes feel overwhelmed with what to do about it and where to start? If so, this book will help you travel down a path…
Tara Brach gave me the language of compassion I didn’t know I was missing.
Her teachings on the “trance of unworthiness” opened a doorway to self-forgiveness that changed my life and my work as a therapist. I love her mix of humor, psychology, and mindfulness practice. Each chapter feels like sitting in meditation beside a friend who understands exactly how the human heart struggles—and how it can heal.
Whenever I am having a bad day, I listen to Tara’s podcasts as well, and it feels like she is speaking directly to me.
For many of us, feelings of deficiency are right around the corner. It doesn’t take much--just hearing of someone else’s accomplishments, being criticized, getting into an argument, making a mistake at work--to make us feel that we are not okay. Beginning to understand how our lives have become ensnared in this trance of unworthiness is our first step toward reconnecting with who we really are and what it means to live fully. —from Radical Acceptance
“Believing that something is wrong with us is a deep and tenacious suffering,” says Tara Brach at the start of this illuminating book. This suffering…
I fell in love with Abigail Thomas’s memoir, her wise voice and writing style.
Her brief vignettes capture the sacredness of ordinary moments: a dog on the couch, a shared meal, a loss remembered. She taught me that healing isn’t dramatic; it’s built quietly through presence and acceptance.
Reading Safekeeping feels like sitting with a friend who has lived, grieved, and found peace in the small details that hold a life together.
A beautifully crafted and inviting account of one woman’s life, Safekeeping offers a sublimely different kind of autobiography. Setting aside a straightforward narrative in favor of brief passages of vivid prose, Abigail Thomas revisits the pivotal moments and the tiny incidents that have shaped her life: pregnancy at 18; single motherhood (of three!) by the age of 26; the joys and frustrations of three marriages; and the death of her second husband, who was her best friend. The stories made of these incidents are startling in their clarity and reassuring in their wisdom.
Gifts from a Challenging Childhood
by
Jan Bergstrom,
Learn to understand and work with your childhood wounds. Do you feel like old wounds or trauma from your childhood keep showing up today? Do you sometimes feel overwhelmed with what to do about it and where to start? If so, this book will help you travel down a path…
This was one of the first books on spirituality and psychology that I ever read.
It helped me integrate my two worlds—Western psychology and Eastern philosophy. Stephen Cope writes with the vulnerability of a seeker and the clarity of a teacher.
I loved how he connected the practice of yoga to the search for meaning and authenticity. His story validated the idea that our struggles and contradictions are not obstacles but gateways to discovering who we truly are.
Millions of Americans know yoga as a superb form of exercise and as a potent source of calm in our stress-filled lives. Far fewer are aware of the full promise of yoga as a 4,000-year-old practical path of liberation—a path that fits the needs of modern Western seekers with startling precision. Now Stephen Cope, a Western-trained psychotherapist who has lived and taught for more than ten years at the largest yoga center in America, offers this marvelously lively and irreverent "pilgrim's progress" for today's world. He demystifies the philosophy, psychology, and practice of yoga, and…
In As Is, physical therapist and yoga therapist Rachel Krentzman shares her raw, intimate journey of healing from family trauma, heartbreak, perfectionism, and self-doubt through the wisdom of yoga. When her father is arrested for selling heroin, the fragile order of her world collapses. In the wreckage of family secrets and spiritual betrayal, Rachel begins a long, uncertain search for truth.
Her path leads through broken marriages, motherhood, and the quiet ache of addiction to love itself. Yoga becomes her refuge, yet even devotion cannot silence the questions that haunt her. Through years of unraveling and reckoning, she learns that healing is less about transcendence than about honesty. As Is is a raw, vulnerable story about finding your true self in the aftermath of everything that once defined you.
