100 Books Like My Voice Will Go with You

In the late 1990s, Sally Fallon (now Sally Fallon Morell) and Mary Enig ignited the modern-day traditional foods movement by publishing the now immensely popular Nourishing Traditions.

This book taught us that it was okay to eat butter, lard made the best pie crusts, and if you were going to fry food, frying was best done in tallow. And that was just the beginning! The subtitle of the book says it all: The Cookbook that Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and Diet Dictocrats.

This book vindicated everything my mother had taught me. Eat real food—not just vegetables—but all real food, including animal foods, and make sure that you eat from the nose to the tail and everything in between. Additionally, don't forget that you must always properly prepare food through slow cooking, culturing, fermenting, or souring to aid in proper digestion.

Oh, and while you're at it, make sure you use… show more.

This book was life-changing for me. Annemarie Colbin shares so much wisdom about eating whole foods as opposed to being on any kind of diet. She is a big advocate of “listening to your body.” She even asserts that if you “forget” to take your supplements, it could be because your body doesn’t need them at this time. In that case, she encourages taking a short break. This book inspired in me the idea of trusting your body to let you know what foods are best for you.

30 years ago, when I was recovering from having a pacemaker implanted in my heart at the young age of 26, I was struggling to figure out how to turn my health around. Though none of my doctors agreed with me, I was certain that the right nutrition could make a difference. On my own, I quit sugar, alcohol, and all substances. This book and others by Dr. Airola helped me immensely in getting my blood sugar under control and to use food to find balance.

Dr. Carlton Fredericks was a nutrition expert ahead of his time. When I was living in New York City in my 20s, I became very sick after living in Tahiti and Guadeloupe, working for Club Med. I pounded the pavement going from doctor to doctor looking for answers. Ultimately, it turned out that I had a systemic infection that caused my heart to almost stop beating.

Still, after a three-week stay in the cardiac care unit of Brooklyn’s Methodist Hospital and a pacemaker implanted in my heart that was keeping me alive, I wanted to know how to thrive. I didn’t want to live as a “sick person” which is what I had become.

I went to see Dr. Fredericks who worked in Dr. Robert Atkins's office, at the time, on the upper east side of Manhattan. He showed me how to eat to balance my blood sugar and get… show more.

I had to choose one of Mark Epstein's many books on this topic. I remember sitting on a meditation cushion and listening to him address a large group of meditators and psychotherapists. In this book he addresses Freud's view of meditation as a regressive quest for the "oceanic feeling" of the infant, but he also points out how Freud suggested an almost Zen-like method for how the psychoanalyst should pay attention to the patient. As a photographer, I was eager to read his discussion about art, meditation and the unconscious. Like all of Epstein's books, this is deeply examined and beautifully written.

An absolutely gorgeous autobiography that never for a moment bogs down in the details, but soars above the timeline of Yalom's life by concerning itself chiefly with glimmers of insight, events that have lived on in his unconscious and formed him into the healer he became. Like all of Yalom's best work, I found myself reading it slowly, savoring every word. The honesty, if you open yourself to it, and accept that he really is telling you the honest to god truth, smacks you in the face like few authors I've ever encountered. I kept thinking, if I do enough psychotherapy for long enough, I might be able to pull off this degree of self-knowledge.

If you don’t mind having your notion of what is really going on upended—again and again—this is the book for you. Maybe what I love most is that the voice of our main actor is so authentic—and often funny. In my opinion, this novel is a masterpiece. Again, if you like audiobooks, this one is extremely well done.

This collection of essays contains pieces by many of the same authors in my first recommendation. But this begins with the historical roots, including early psychoanalytic arguments that meditation was an attempt to return to the womb. Also, there are Buddhist writers emphasizing that in meditating you're trying to get to a state of "no mind," so what good was psychotherapy? But the book moves to a conversation between a Japanese Zen teacher and C.G. Jung, and then towards the Dalai Lama's thoughts about the unconscious. It even includes a writer who is both a psychoanalyst and a Zen priest.

Dorothy Rowe’s books I discovered by accident in a Winchester second-hand bookshop, placed in the psychology section. A woman of considerable wisdom gained through her psychotherapy practice and her experience of the vicissitudes of life, Beyond Fear deals with something we all have to encounter, yet which so few of us properly understand and therefore disempower. Rowe explains in this life-changing book how fear manifests through various conditions, such as depression, a subject on which she is an acknowledged expert. I love it that she refused to simplify life, confronting it in all its difficult complexities. Life isn’t easy—we all discover that.

This is one of my all-time favorite books for introducing a non-dual approach to therapy. I love that each chapter is written by a different well-known spiritual teacher (Adyashanti and Peter Fenner) or an experienced therapist (e.g., Stephan Bodian, Dorothy Hunt, Lynn Marie Lumiere, and John Welwood). 

These practitioners describe the healing power of the unconditioned mind in their own way (with a diversity that I truly enjoy). They explore the question: What happens when therapists act as a “sacred mirror” for their clients' essential nature? "How might a therapist reflect back to their clients not only the contents of awareness—e.g., thoughts, feelings, and sensations—but also awareness itself? Such provocative and important questions, and how delightful to hear the responses presented in this book!