100 books like Buddha's Brain

This book, by Bessel Van Der Kolk, MD (Viking, September 2014), a bestseller, is probably the most renowned book on childhood trauma. His book changed my life and the way I look at healing from childhood trauma. \

Bessel has received praise from laypeople and professionals for this highly readable book. In it, Kolk emphasizes how the brain understands trauma and how, through different strategies, the brain can rewire itself to filter out thoughts and feelings associated with trauma.

Neuro-feedback, mindfulness, yoga, and play are included in the book to give the reader different methods for how to change the way the brain holds onto trauma. I have raved about Kolk’s title and the authenticity of his writing.  

The memoir of world-renowned psychologist Marsha Linehan, who happens to be someone I greatly admire for creating the treatment that I use: Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT).  This book relays Linehan’s struggles as a teen and adult with her own mental health condition, including self-harming behaviors and thoughts of suicide, and how her experience contributed to her creation of a therapy that has likely saved millions of lives.

This is an enlightening memoir recounting the story and journey of experiencing and recovering from a stroke. I love this book because it uniquely combines perspectives of the author being a researcher (neuroscientist), patient (experiencing the stroke), and just a common person with a normal life - which was turned upside down by the stroke. The author walks you through the arduous physical and emotional roller coaster of recovery, a few neurons at a time. The human brain candidly expressing what happened to itself, is a marvelously fascinating concept that you get to learn by reading this book.

In this book, a medical doctor makes the connection between suppressed emotions, especially anger and rage, and disease in the body.

When we live inauthentic lives, our bodies manifest this self-abandonment through auto-immune issues (literally the body turning against itself). He notes that women especially have the tendency to abandon themselves to serve others which creates repressed resentments that come out as disease in the body. It helped explain my painful bout with shingles which became a turning point for me in committing to living for myself instead of others.

Most creatives struggle with maintaining a creative practice in the face of busted water heaters, draining day jobs, and pesky emotions especially anxiety and depression. Beth’s refreshingly honest handbook is built on the premise you must find a way to make your art no matter what. She’s also been a guest on my podcast Create Out Loud and I loved everything she shared.

This is one of those secret gems of a book that hardly anybody has heard of but after you read it, you’ll be giving multiple copies away to every creative you know. Rich with real-life examples from working artists and writers, and Priscilla’s long history as a working creative and teacher, I have underlined an idea or suggestion on almost every page.

I’m a writing mentor and coach, and this book has helped so many of my novelists understand and implement dramatic story structure. If you are trying to write fiction, screenplays, or memoir, and you haven’t read this, prepare to have your mind blown open. I have one word for you: misbelief. Go read the book and you’ll soon understand why it’s a game-changer. Note: Lisa doesn’t mention memoir but when I interviewed her on my podcast, she assured me the concepts work beautifully and have been successfully applied. 

Oliver Burkman saved me from myself. I had a sneaky suspicion that although I claimed to have weaned myself off the addiction of constant optimization, I wasn't absolutely clean, but reading his book was the best rehab I could imagine.

Oliver is incredibly smart and incredibly creative. I've enjoyed his columns for years, but now he has honed his writing style so brilliantly that I couldn't help but be riveted by what can often be quite a boring subject—time and how we use it.

We are our time, and our fixation with it is often unhealthy. Reading this gave me a perceptual reboot that has made me think quite differently about not only each day and how I use it but also how I should think about life. It's novel, entertaining, and enlightening. It's well worth investing one of your 4000 weeks.

Ah, it's still the best book on awakening! Despite its sublime title, this book is actually mostly about the ecstasy, with its multiple instances of “awakening porn”—alluring accounts of how someone, seemingly out of nowhere, while quietly washing the dishes or watering the garden, suddenly underwent a radical shift in perception and experience that opened up a whole new world.

Often, they say they don’t know how to speak of it, yet somehow do, in ways that send ripples and goosebumps through the body and skin of this reader. Handled with the deep kindness of Kornfield’s wise heart, they are never repetitive, always fresh, and collectively steer us through the author’s extensive commentary to understand what it would mean not just to awaken but to live an ever-deepening path of awakening.

As his students, me included, call him, Tal is a remarkable teacher. His compact book of one hundred and sixty-nine pages is filled with valuable and applicable knowledge on being happier.

He draws a lot from his young life as an athlete and into adult life as a Harvard professor, along with his wellbeing research. His book is set up in three parts: defining happiness, applying happiness, and meditations on happiness. Tal uses “time-in” to have readers stop and reflect on a question relevant to the reading material, which helps one better consider the material more thoughtfully.

The other thing about Tal as a teacher is his approach. It aligns greatly with my ideas about happiness, hence why I study his work. He, more specifically in his happiness studies program, fosters cultivating one's "wholebeing." A term I was already using when I came across his teachings. For me, happiness is… show more.