Go Down the Rabbit Hole With Us!
Books, talks, poets, troublemakers who influenced interbeing approaches to therapy

Body, trauma + nervous system

• My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies — Resmaa Menakem
  Embodied trauma, racialized trauma, collective healing, and the ways history lives in bodies—not just thoughts.

• Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma — Peter Levine
  One of the foundational texts behind Somatic Experiencing: trauma as something held and worked through in the nervous system and body.

• The Body Is Not an Apology — Sonya Renee Taylor
  Question all the messages we've absorbed about which bodies are worthy, beautiful, healthy, acceptable, or deserving of care. Radical self-love is the way of healing the shame we've learned and challenging the systems that taught it to us in the first place.

• 🎧 Listen: Kristin Neff is a psychologist, researcher, and one of the world’s leading voices on self-compassion. Her work explores what changes when we learn to relate to ourselves with the same kindness, humanity, and care we might offer someone we love. We especially appreciate that her version of self-compassion isn’t just soft and soothing—it can also be fierce, helping us protect ourselves, set boundaries, and stand up for what we need. She has many freely available resources here.
  

Mindfulness, interbeing + coming home

• 🎧 Listen: Tara Brach is a psychologist, meditation teacher, and author whose work brings together Western psychology and Buddhist wisdom. We especially like how she brings humor and practicality to even the most difficult topics. Her teachings on Radical Acceptance and the RAIN practice are especially worth exploring. Explore her free resources here.

• 🎧 Listen: Thich Nhat Hanh talks about interbeing here and a wonderful podcast on Thich Nhat Hanh’s teachings are here.

• The Miracle of Mindfulness — Thích Nhất Hạnh
  Originally written as a long letter to a student in exile during the Vietnam War to help social workers maintain peace and compassion amid chaos. Wonderful instruction and thoughts on mindfulness.

• When Things Fall Apart — Pema Chödrön
  Staying present with uncertainty, pain and imperfection rather than treating difficult experience as evidence that something has gone wrong.

• Buddha’s Brain - Rick Hanson and Richard Mendius
  Brings together neuroscience, psychology, and contemplative practice to explore a pretty hopeful idea: our brains can change. Through neuroplasticity, the experiences we repeatedly notice and take in can gradually shape how our brains respond to the world.

• A Queer Dharma: Yoga and Meditations for Liberation — Jacoby Ballard — This book brings together queerness, contemplative practice, embodiment, social justice, and liberation while questioning some of the oppressive dynamics within Western yoga culture.

• The Radiance Sutras — Lorin Roche
  A poetic, embodied interpretation of the Vijñāna Bhairava Tantra that treats sensation, wonder, desire, breath and ordinary embodied life as doorways into presence.

• Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver — Mary Oliver
  Nature, attention, wonder, grief, belonging and being alive.

Relationships + communication + community

• Say What You Mean: A Mindful Approach to Nonviolent Communication — Oren Jay Sofer — Combines classic NVC with mindfulness and somatic awareness, including noticing what’s happening inside your body while you're communicating.

• Set Boundaries, Find Peace — Nedra Glover Tawwab — Extremely accessible and practical. What boundaries actually are, identify where we need them, communicate them clearly, and tolerate the discomfort that can come with setting them.

• Wired for Love — Stan Tatkin
  Brings together attachment, neuroscience, and nervous-system regulation to explain why our closest relationships can bring out some of our biggest reactions. He helps couples understand the patterns underneath conflict and learn how to create more safety, trust, and connection with each other.

• Polysecure — Jessica Fern
  Great look at attachment, jealousy, security, and connection beyond the assumptions of monogamy. Blends attachment theory with consensual non-monogamy to explore a bigger question: What actually makes a relationship feel safe—and how do we build that safety without trying to control each other?

• The Whole-Brain Child — Daniel Siegel & Tina Payne Bryson — Accessible neuroscience paired with concrete parenting strategies. Great introduction to understanding what happens in a child's brain during big emotions.

• The Gardener and the Carpenter — Alison Gopnik — Thought provoking parenting book that helps us remember that children aren't products we're supposed to manufacture correctly. Our job is closer to creating a rich, safe ecosystem in which they can become themselves.

• 🎧 Listen: Building Accountable Communities — Barnard Center for Research on Women + Project NIA
  This series of conversations explores transformative justice—ways of responding to harm that center safety, accountability, repair, and change without automatically reaching for punishment, shame, or disposability.
  You can watch/listen here
  

Liberation, identity + collective healing

• Decolonizing Therapy: Oppression, Historical Trauma & Politicizing Your Practice — Jennifer Mullan, PsyD
  A powerful challenge to the idea that distress can be understood outside history, culture, power, oppression, ancestry and community.

• Decolonizing Trauma Work: Indigenous Stories and Strategies — Renee Linklater
  Indigenous perspectives on trauma and wellness that challenge the dominance of Western psychiatric frameworks and locate healing within culture, community and relationship.

• Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice — Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
  Queer, disabled, mixed-race perspectives on care, bodies, access, interdependence, trauma, community, and collective liberation.

• Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good — adrienne maree brown
  Pleasure, aliveness, embodiment and joy as part of liberation—not something we earn after we finish healing. Queer feminist embodied liberation!

• The Queer Art of Failure — Jack Halberstam
  Questions conventional ideas of success, productivity, normalcy, and what a life is “supposed” to look like.

• Unmasking Autism — Devon Price
  What happens when neurodivergent people spend years learning to hide, suppress, or perform around their natural ways of moving through the world—and what it can look like to begin peeling those layers away.

• Pedagogy of the Oppressed — Paulo Freire
  Freire’s ideas about liberation, dialogue, power and rejecting the expert-as-authority are foundational for a collaborative therapy model where YOU are the expert in your own healing.

• All About Love — bell hooks
  bell hooks asks us to rethink love—not simply as a feeling, but as something we practice through care, honesty, respect, responsibility, and connection. She explores how our families, relationships, culture, and systems shape what we've learned to call love—and how we can choose something different.

• 🎧 Listen: Audre Lorde was a Black, queer, feminist, poet, writer, and activist who wrote fiercely about power, identity, oppression, love, and liberation. In her essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” Lorde reminds us that pleasure and aliveness aren't frivolous—they can be a compass. When we reconnect with what we deeply feel and desire, we become less willing to settle for ways of living that disconnect us from ourselves. Healing isn't only about reducing pain; it's also about reclaiming our capacity to feel fully, deeply alive. Read the whole book, SISTER OUTSIDER, or you can listen to Lorde delivering her essay here.