The Reading List
Some links on this page are affiliate links. If you purchase through them I receive a small commission at no extra cost to you. I only ever recommend books I have genuinely read and that have mattered to my own healing. Your trust means everything — I would never recommend something I don’t believe in.
Books that have genuinely shaped my healing — across every layer.
These are not recommendations I’ve assembled from the internet. They are books I have actually lived with — some of them during the hardest years of TSW, some of them during the slow work of understanding myself more deeply. I share them because they gave me something real, and because I believe they might give you something too. Some links are affiliate links — meaning I receive a small commission at no extra cost to you. I only ever recommend books I have genuinely read and returned to.
The Physical Layer
Where the story begins — the body, the skin, the burning. These books gave me a new understanding of what the body is actually doing, and why healing is always possible.
List with the physical layer books at bookshop.org
The Body Keeps the Score — Bessel van der Kolk
A whole new perspective on healing — and on the understanding that what happens to us doesn’t just live in our minds, it lives in our bodies. This book gave me hope that healing is always possible, even when the body feels like the enemy.
Waking the Tiger — Peter Levine
A whole new perspective on what the nervous system is holding and why. Reading this helped me understand my body not as something broken, but as something that had been trying to protect me all along.
Dying to Be Me — Anita Moorjani
One of the most hope-filled books I have ever read about healing. Anita’s story gave me a different way of understanding what the body is capable of — and what becomes possible when we stop fighting ourselves.
You Are the Placebo — Joe Dispenza
A completely new perspective on how the mind and body work together in healing. This book helped me understand that healing isn’t just physical — and that we are far more capable of change than we’ve been taught.
The Emotional Layer
The grief, the rage, the tenderness beneath the surface. These books helped me understand how emotions shape our health, how the past lives in the present, and why feeling is not weakness — it’s medicine.
List with the emotional layer books at bookshop.org
The Myth of Normal — Gabor Maté
This book gave me a profound understanding of how emotions play a role in illness — and why so much of what we call disease is really the body’s response to a world that doesn’t always allow us to be fully human. Essential reading.
It Didn’t Start With You — Mark Wolynn
An eye-opening exploration of how genetics and ancestry shape our emotional patterns — and how healing can ripple across generations. This book helped me understand parts of my story I couldn’t find in my own lifetime.
Every book Brianna Wiest has written has offered me something — insight, inspiration, a way of framing hard things that makes them feel more navigable. Her writing meets you where you are without pretending it’s simpler than it is.
The Mountain is You – When You’re Ready:This is How you Heal – 101 Essays That will Change the way you Think
The Mental Layer
The beliefs, the stories, the survival patterns. These books helped me understand how the mind works — and how to work with it rather than against it.
List with the Mental layer books at bookshop.org
You Can Heal Your Life — Louise Hay
A foundational book for understanding how our thoughts and beliefs shape our experience. This gave me a completely new understanding of the mind’s role in healing — and permission to believe that change is possible.
The Untethered Soul — Michael Singer
One of the clearest explorations I’ve found of how the mind works and how to stop being ruled by it. This book helped me understand what it means to work with the mind instead of fighting it — and what becomes available when you do.
The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari — Robin Sharma
A book that inspired me deeply about what it means to live with intention — and about the possibility of rebuilding a life that is actually aligned with who you are.
The Spiritual Layer
The remembering beneath it all. These books connected me to something bigger, deeper, and truer than the story I had been living inside — and gave me language for the spiritual dimension of healing.
List with the spiritual layer books Bookshop.org
Conversations with God — Neale Donald Walsch
A book that opened something in me I didn’t know was closed. Reading this gave me a connection to a deeper truth — one that felt less like information and more like remembering something I had always known.
The Celestine Prophecy — James Redfield
A story that helped me understand the deeper currents running beneath everyday life — and deepened my sense of connection to something larger than myself.
A Return to Love — Marianne Williamson
This book brought me back to something essential. It gave me a framework for understanding healing, relationships, and life through the lens of love rather than fear.
A book I have returned to many times. It gave me hope — and a reminder that the journey toward who we are meant to become is rarely straight, but always meaningful.
A profound and layered exploration of who we are at our deepest level. This book connected me to a sense of my own purpose and nature that nothing else had quite reached.
Dense, challenging, and deeply rewarding. This material connected me to a core deeper truth about consciousness, healing, and what it means to be human — and something beyond human.
Rebecca Campbell’s writing — and her oracle decks — have been constant companions in my healing. Her work gave me a connection to spirit, soul, and the sacred that felt genuinely nourishing rather than performative.
Bookshop.org books · Bookshop.org oracle decks
The HSP Layer
Books that helped me understand who I have always been — and begin to see my sensitivity not as a wound to heal, but as the center of everything.
List of the books about sensitivity on Bookshop.org
The Highly Sensitive Person — Elaine Aron
The book that began to explain my whole life and my entire healing journey. Reading this gave me language for who I am and have always been — and opened the door to accepting myself rather than fighting myself.
The Highly Sensitive Person in Love — Elaine Aron
An essential companion to the first book — and a deeply helpful exploration of how sensitivity shapes our closest relationships.
Spirituality Through a Highly Sensitive lens — Elaine Aron
Elaine Aron’s most recent work, and one that connected the HSP experience to the spiritual dimension in a way that felt deeply true to my own journey.
Sensitive is the new Strong — Anita Moorjani
A beautiful exploration of sensitivity as a gift rather than a burden — and a reconnection to soul, true self, and the center of who we are.
The Midnight Library — Matt Haig
A novel that touched something deep in me about the lives we live, the ones we don’t, and what it means to find your way back to yourself. A quiet and powerful read.
You can find my book lists here
A note on affiliate links
Some links on this page are affiliate links. If you purchase through them I receive a small commission at no extra cost to you. I only ever recommend books I have genuinely read and that have mattered to my own healing. Your trust means everything — I would never recommend something I don’t believe in.