Fans pick 100 books like Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness

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.

This is my go-to book now for clients who are looking for more trauma-informed and inclusive versions of Twelve Step programs. I have never read another book on the Twelve Steps that so thoroughly and gracefully weaves so many different knowledge areas and traditions together in such a seamless whole and that so thoroughly models inclusion and cross-cultural curiosity.  

And, oh my, the number of fabulous practices that are given as examples is like a treasure-trove of gems for both practitioners and clients alike. I love the kindness and generosity that is present in this book’s expansive invitation to embodied healing in the recovery journey. 

I loved the way this book spoke to me. I found the messages deep and meaningful. Reading it ignited a lot of healing. I have been able to dip back in from time to time to remind myself of the important mindful lessons.

This book has helped me let go of a lot of stress that I have been attached to for many years. 

I consider this to be one of the great wordless graphic novels. It’s a hyper-colored meditation on the creative power and potential of human hands, full of movement, energy, and effort. It’s amazing to see a work like this that’s so full of power, like a raw force of nature, yet there’s no violence or destruction. Sit in a quiet corner and give every page of this book your full attention and tell me how your brain feels afterward. 

This is Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche’s first book in English. And what I love about this book is that he puts it all out, no withholding. He talks about his life as a child entering the monastic life, at the monastery not too far from his house, and relates how he visited his mom, and the mantras he would recite if he was scared at night coming back to the monastery.

He describes his powerful dreams and the practice of dark retreat, where he stayed for the traditional 49 days when he was only fifteen years old. And the wonderful experiences, visions, and connections to the higher dzogchen practices of cutting through discursive throughs (trekchod) and leaps of visions (thogyal).

I recommend this book not because the author runs, as do I, but because she connects the physical body with freedom and insight. She has felt the stillness during movement. You are fully in the moment and everything is one. I met Vanessa Zeuisei Goddard, by chance when my husband and I visited Zen Mountain Monastery where she was practicing and where Ed had practiced years before. The retreats were between sessions, on a break from silence, so she and I were able to talk. To speak with someone who is both on the meditative path and who meditates while she moves gave me the courage to move forward with my work on my own movement meditation book. I step into the lineage, a tradition her lovely volume follows.

In this straightforward meditation manual, Bhante G. (as he is affectionately called) sets forth the hows and whys of mindfulness meditation. When I first learned to meditate, I found this simple but profound book the most accessible of the many books available. My husband and I were so impressed with Bhante’s wisdom that we brought him to Columbus, Ohio to teach a weekend retreat for our local mindfulness group. He was warm, caring, and funny. His personality comes across in this small, but mighty book.

Did you know that today’s “mindfulness” movement—which promises everything from greater corporate productivity to more passion in the bedroom—originated in nineteenth-century resistance to the British Empire?

After the conquest of Burma, meditation—previously something mostly the domain of wilderness hermits—became a technique everyone could use to strengthen Buddhist Burmese society against cultural imperialism. Burmese teachers brought this practice to America, and Americans came to Burma to learn it directly.

It was fascinating to follow meditation’s journey in these pages from a tool of resistance against globalization to a technique brought around the world by globalization today. This book helped me appreciate the strange history of mindfulness meditation.