Fans pick 100 books like When the Body Says No

I’ve read this book over and over and highlighted something new every time. Somehow, through the lens of Nazi death camps, Frankl validates everyone’s suffering, including my own. I’ve always known that suffering is an inescapable part of the human experience, but this helped me understand that to the brain, it isn’t relative in the ways I always thought.

Furthermore, this book helped me understand that my coping mechanisms inform suffering’s hold on me. Stories are a coping mechanism, and I learned that redirecting my attention and creating my personal narratives around what is meaningful to me rather than the source of pain is key to the cage of suffering. This book changed how I understand the importance of purpose and the power of what I build my stories around. 

This book has been extremely influential and helpful to my journey as a creative photographer. This is a short book and covers material that is often not easy because it gets at some of the deep-seated reasons that many of us find it hard to consistently create art.

The underlying issue is “resistance”: a force that is the antithesis of creativity and serves to stymie us all to a greater or lesser degree. I have found the succinct discussion of resistance in the book, along with tools and techniques for overcoming resistance, one of the most valuable discussions I have encountered in my journey as a photographer and artist.

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.

What if the worst possible thing that happened to you was the best possible thing? After a cataclysmic injury to her brain, author Bolte Taylor walks us through what she learned about being human because of this event. ‘Everything is energy’ is the message I walked away from this book with, and I remember that message weekly.

Somehow, this neuroscientist is able to discuss our spiritual nature by explaining what happened to her when her ‘brain went offline.’ It is a beautiful and affecting book that, as I say, has stuck with me for years.

I read this book as part of my Search Inside Yourself (SIY) facilitator training when I worked at Google and later taught. I love this book because it’s full of science-based research on the power of mindfulness. I personally love all of Rick’s books and hosted him on my podcast, The Pausecast podcast (Ep. 17), where he blends his psychology and mindfulness expertise into easy and relatable concepts.

This book stuck out to me because Hanson shares how great teachers like Jesus, Moses, Mohammed, Gandhi, and the Buddha all had brains built essentially like anyone else's, yet they were able to harness their thoughts and shape their patterns of thinking in ways that changed history. I was inspired by their stories and also saw how I could model my own thinking in ways that better serve me and the world. 

Being Mortal exposes the often-inhumane ways “modern healthcare” cares for older people who are ill. Too often, we send older people to soulless institutionalized living facilities, overtreat them with medications and procedures, and undertreat them with kindness and dignity.

We can do much better in caring for chronically ill elderly people, and Gawande makes a strong case for doing so in this beautifully written book. I assign this book for my healthcare seminar, and it often emboldens students to intervene in the healthcare and living experiences of elderly family members. It happens every semester. I love it!

In Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend a terrible event (a dear friend and mentor’s suicide) results in the unnamed narrator’s acceptance, out of a sense of responsibility, of an unwanted burden (the heartbroken Great Dane, Apollo−the narrator admitting she is more of a cat person).

I love that by book’s end, that obligation turns out to be a precious gift that assuages both their griefs, serving to connect them to the departed one they both loved. Along the way we, lucky readers, get to eavesdrop on the literary discourse of an agile mind attempting to parse the unparsable as the narrator, a writer herself, addresses both the lost (her mentor) and the found (the dog).

Does the dog die? Don’t ask and I won’t tell.

The amazing results achieved with energy healing raise profound questions concerning the nature of consciousness and the human energy anatomy and how these suggest the existence of a much broader conception of reality than consensual thought allows for, and it is with respect to this broader conception that Rupert Sheldrake proves such an informative guide. His central concept - that of the existence of ‘morphic fields’ connecting all sentient life-forms and the influence that they exert on our emotional and physical lives through the phenomena of ‘morphic resonance’ - provides the ‘missing link’ in our understanding of consciousness and as well as the root causes of much of the mental, emotional and physical ill-health that we encounter as healers. 

Comprehensive in scope, deep in the accumulated experience and knowledge brought to bear on the issue of mental, emotional, and physical well-being; this amazing work played a crucial role in awakening me to the broader horizons of the healer’s work. Ranging from crises of psychic, spiritual, and kundalini awakening to the trauma of UFO encounters; this work seeks to chart a supportive path whereby spontaneous traumatic openings to that ‘something larger’ which lays beyond us can be viewed and responded to as susceptible to integration, rather than suppressive medical interventions, thereby opening unparalleled opportunities for profound personal and spiritual growth.