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Writer's pictureSarah Laverty

Five books on embodiment for your bookshelf


Books lined up on their sides
Photo by Tom Hermans on Unsplash

I’ve always been a big reader, and over the last few years I’ve devoured many books on trauma, embodiment and the body. These books have opened my eyes and helped me to perceive the world with a new perspective.


Reading can’t replace the actual practice of resensitising ourselves to our felt senses and learning to navigate our inner landscape, but it can help us to make sense of how the body works, and satisfy our rational brain that this embodiment stuff makes sense.


In no particular order, here are my five recommendations for your embodiment book shelf:


When the Body Says No (The Cost of Hidden Stress) - Gabor Maté


This book blew my mind.


Gabor Maté is a doctor who has specialised in child developmental trauma and the lifelong impacts it can have on peoples’ mental and physical health. ‘When the Body Says No’ draws on scientific research and the author’s decades of experience to explore the mind-body relationship and in particular how stress can manifest as physical illnesses in the body.


Most interesting for me was the expansive definition of stress in the book. While many of us simply think of a busy work day or hectic family life, Maté delves deeper, defining stress as being the result of a repeated denial of the instinctual and innate self. The wealth of information in this book offers such a potent argument for reclaiming the parts of ourselves that we have denied, and learning how to live authentically.



Emergent Strategy - Adrienne Maree Brown


I read this book when I was working as a campaigner, before I had even started any of my own regular embodiment work! It contributed to a growing interest, pointing me in the direction of the path I am now on.


This book is part self-help, part campaign strategy, part visionary sci-fi. It’s as undefinable as Adrienne Maree Brown herself. So many of our activist communities replicate the very systems that we are trying to change. Emergent Strategy acknowledges this truth that so many of us avoid or pay too little attention to, and calls on us to use the wisdom of the Earth, nature, the body and our imaginations to create a new world within ourselves.


Whilst this book is likely to be of most interest to activists and campaigners, I believe it is of relevance to everyone, as we are all members of the human race trying to navigate life on Earth during the era of climate change and biological collapse. And it’s one of the most hopeful books you’ll ever read.



A New Earth - Eckhart Tolle


This is a book to read and re-read.


Eckhart Tolle is a spiritual teacher who had a spiritual awakening aged 29 and entered a state of enlightenment. When I first stumbled upon his work I wasn’t remotely spiritual. In fact, I was deeply struggling with a recent health diagnosis and repeated panic attacks. The simple message the the core of all of Tolle’s teachings is that “now is all there is”.


Sometimes it isn’t until life gives us such an immense weight to carry that we can feel the truth, hope, and joy of that statement.


While ‘A New Earth’ is a much more accessible read, in my opinion, than Tolle’s previous work, it’s still something that takes a while for many of us to “get” on a deeper level. If you read it and find it not to your liking, perhaps leave it on the shelf and pick it up in a year or two to see how it lands then.


I see this book as an important piece in the jigsaw of my embodiment practice - I need the other parts for the picture to really come alive, but without it, it isn’t complete.



Rest is Resistance - Tricia Hersey


If you’ve been reading my newsletter for a while you’ll know I’ve written about “Rest is Resistance” before. That’s because I’m obsessed with it! After my first time reading it I promptly started it again for a second time.


‘Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto’ is a call to arms for our times. Based on Hersey’s own experience of resisting capitalism and white supremacy through a politics of refusal it is grounded in black liberation theology, womanism, Afrofuturism and spirituality. Hersey calls us to recognise that rest is our divine right as beings on this planet and explains how ‘grind culture’ is a modern day reinvention of the racist economic exploitation which began on plantations in America.


I adore this book because it feels like being gently awoken from a spell.


It is simple, poetic and calls on us not to simply read it, but to allow it to infuse our days, dreams and daydreams. It reminds me that the systems that oppress us don’t just exist outside of us - they exist within us in our smallest movements. And it calls us all to embark on “slow unravelling” so that we may all be free.



The Wisdom of Anxiety - Sheryl Paul


Sheryl Paul is such a gem. This fabulous book upends the typical idea in much of the self help world that anxiety is something to be ‘got rid of’ and instead invites us to recognise how much wisdom and power lies in our anxiety.


As a pyschologist who has experienced years of severe anxiety herself, from panic attacks to relationship anxiety, and come out the other side, Paul calls for a mindset shift, from viewing anxiety as something shameful to a messenger inviting us towards deeper healing.


The book includes multiple exercises that you can apply in your own life, as well as Paul’s beautiful musings on life and stories of her own healing and that of her patients. I would highly recommend this book to anyone who has struggled with anxiety over the years, particularly if you’ve already sought treatment but still feel like it hasn’t gotten to the bottom of things.



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