What It Takes to Heal asserts that the principles of embodiment—the recognition of our body’s sensations and habits, and the beliefs that inform them—are critical to lasting healing and change. Hemphill, an expert embodiment practitioner, therapist, and activist who has partnered with Brené Brown, Tarana Burke, and Esther Perel, among others, shows us that we don’t have to carry our emotional burdens alone. Hemphill demonstrates a future in which healing is done in community, weaving together stories from their own experience as a trauma survivor with clinical accounts and lessons learned from their time as a social movement architect. They ask, “What would it do to movements, to our society and culture, to have the principles of healing at the very center? And what does it do to have healing at the center of every structure and everything we create?”

The five kleshas are: ignorance (avidya); overidentification with ego (asmita); attachment to desire or pleasure (raga); aversion or avoidance (dvesha); and fear of death or letting go (abhinivesha). Each one leads us to create tendencies and karma that move us away from realizing and remembering our true nature and seeing ourselves as separate from one another and the planet. In yogic terms, this perpetuates a constant cycle of pain for us all. In Illuminating Our True Nature, Johnson offers us a way to find a sense of clarity, groundedness, and equanimity within ourselves by working through the kleshas one-by-one using asana, pranayama, mudra, mantra, reflection questions, and meditation.

All In is a queer feminist memoir of cancer and what it means to survive. With the generous and community-minded heart of an organizer, Breedlove chronicles harms caused by our profit-driven health care system, and explores the rigors of single parenting while living with chronic illness; the medical neglect that women, the LGBTQ+ community, and others on the margins experience; and her challenges with addiction. And, like Audre Lorde and Barbara Ehrenreich, she calls out the insidious impact of “toxic positivity” on women who live with cancer. The result is an intensely powerful narrative about the connective potential of grief and forging a new life.

How are we incarcerated by others' gazes? Who gets to be good in a society built upon hierarchy? How might we embrace each other's madnesses? Sanah Ahsan asks questions that travel to the heart of our humanness, bending the lines between psychologist and client to show us the sacred nature of our wounds. These poems kneel to the messiness of being alive, building altars to complication and presence. Refusing binaries of gender or religious doctrine, I cannot be good until you say it finds what is to be revered in the grey spaces of morality, advancing imagination and self-compassion as sites of communion. Intricately weaving Quranic verse, psychology, and the hip-hop soundtrack of their childhood, Sanah's poems reach for divinity in the body; an archive that refuses erasure.

This is a book about a walk. This book is about a walk that goes from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific. It’s a book about a walk that I have been dreaming of taking since I was sixteen years old. I am now sixty years old. What you are reading was written in six months. It is the start of a conversation. It feels—and is—unfinished…I am listening for stories and then finding ways to say them out loud. And then I am listening for the bounce back. Listening for each story’s impact more than its meaning. It’s how relationships, all relationships, work. Act. Bounce back. Learn. Act again.