Fans pick 100 books like The Mind-Body Guide to the Twelve Steps

This is the best book I’ve ever found for guiding clients with step-by-step instructions and practices for developing a somatic capacity for resilience in the face of stress. This is the book I would want to write if I were writing the perfect book to give to clients to support their healing. It’s like handing clients the keys to their own healing process. I love it so much I agreed to write the foreword!

And…it’s perfectly structured. I know that’s not the usual reason for loving a book, but as an educator I can say that the learning structure is so perfect that it makes the content accessible and understandable for clients who struggle with learning from written material. 

This is the most compassionate and humorous book about anxiety that I’ve ever read. Who would have thought that it could be this much fun to learn about anxiety? I mean, really, really learn about anxiety from someone who has felt its challenges and who has wrestled those challenges into an incredibly helpful and practical set of tools.  

I love recommending this book to clients because I know they will feel seen and understood when they read it. I also know they will come away with more compassion for themselves, less shame, and a more expanded context in which to understand their anxiety symptoms. Most vitally, they will have been encouraged to take ownership of their relationship to the anxiety they feel.

This is the book that transformed my understanding of the somatics of addiction and compulsion. For almost 30 years, this has been the book I’ve recommended to clients most frequently. It is astonishing in its simplicity and elegance. The process of befriending and listening to our bodies as a way to engage with patterns that have previously felt out of control has become the underlying architecture of my work and teaching.

This is the book that I come back to again and again for inspiration. It is also the book that clients tell me they come back to again and again. It places the client firmly at the center of their own healing journey, with tools that every one of us carries around with us every day.

Again and again, I had the experience of clients seeking out meditation and mindfulness practices to relieve their trauma symptoms–only to see those clients come undone by the very thing they thought would help. I struggled to find resources that would help them understand how they could access those powerful tools of transformation without having their symptoms exacerbated.

This book completely eliminated that struggle for me. The relief I felt when I first read this book was profound: I had found the safety net for my clients I had been longing for. It has everything in it that I would want a client with a trauma history to know before including mindfulness practices in their healing journey, including putting those practices into cultural contexts that further enhance their safety.  

Drawing upon stories from all the great spiritual traditions, Kurtz and Ketcham keep shocking us out of our assumptions about the spiritual life, and inviting us to abandon the pursuit of perfection that many of us identify with it. They pull the rug out from under us, telling us what we don’t expect to hear. There’s something comical about embracing imperfection. But if they’re right, it’s the only real alternative to living tragically. I suggest watching Chaplin’s City Lights and Laurel and Hardy’s The Music Box, as you make your way through the chapters of this book.

That two of my “best books” involve the 12 Steps of Recovery is no accident. They are a prescription to personal progress that can be parlayed into marital wellness. 

While Alcoholics Anonymous is the most influential recovery book ever written, the secondary text of the adjacent yet unaffiliated Narcotics Anonymous may be the most impactful. 
It Works, How & Why lays out the organization’s 12 Steps – which mirror those devised by its predecessor, Alcoholics Anonymous – in a deeper, more descriptive fashion than perhaps any other tome (it also uses more modern, accessible language, given its 1993 publication). With matter-of-fact language and easy-to-grasp metaphors, the text fleshes out what the 12 Steps are, what they aren’t, and why they are so vital to longstanding recovery from addiction.

This is another memoir that pulled me right in. Like Hepola, I loved the excitement of the whole bar scene, and quite often, drank until I blacked out. Trying to blackout things from my childhood that caused me so much anxiety and pain. And then having to remember and heal from it all when I got sober. 

Besides the fact that Laura and I have so much in common (our first name, our publication date, our genre), I am a huge fan of the way she makes recovery accessible to everyone. 

In Push Off From Here, Laura uses her experience to encourage the reader to explore their relationship with substances. Her ‘nine essential truths to get you through sobriety and everything else’ are simple, spot-on, and user-friendly.   

One alcoholic helping another is the way the 12 Step program works.

This book explores Steps 6 and 7 from the personal experiences of others in recovery. It helped me examine my defects, you know, the rocks I held that were sinking me. But I am not alone in my quest to drop these rocks.

This book includes personal stories that let me know how others have overcome the same roadblocks as myself. They talk to me, addressing my need to spiritually surrender my shortcomings. Various insights help contribute to my sobriety which, after all, is what I strive for in a clean and sober life.

What if addiction isn’t a chronic relapsing disease, as described by the National Institute on Drug Abuse? What if a better way to think about it is as a type of learning disorder? Neuroscientist and author Marc Lewis, himself a recovering addict, makes his compelling argument through the stories of five people suffering from substance use disorders. This insightful book left me believing that the attempt to fit addiction into rigid categories does a disservice to the complexity of this condition.