healing

“Untangling” by Barbara McGavin and Ann Weiser Cornell

June 6, 2026 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

Subtitle: How You Can Transform What’s Impossibly Stuck
Recommended to me by: Their courses and books about Focusing

McGavin and Cornell co-run Focusing Resources and teach Inner Relationship Focusing. Focusing is a way of looking inward with gentle curiosity and keeping company with what’s unclear to help it clarify and shift.

Back in 2020, I took their year-long course Getting Free: A Year of Untangling. It turned out to be a good year to be taking an online course! I knew they were writing a book about the course material, so I was curious when I saw that it had been published.

I had an immediate sense that the material had been reorganized, and flowed much better than the course handouts. Interestingly, late in the book they say that they had to step back and get a sense of the whole book, and were led to do a major reorganization.

The book clearly and kindly explains their techniques for dissolving Tangles – stuck places in our lives where we are at war with ourselves, and everything we do to try to solve the tangle just pulls it tighter. They include both personal stories about tangles, and stories from their students.

While I left the course feeling like their techniques were too persnickety and heady and intense, the book softens all that. Recommended if you’ve learned some Focusing and are curious about applying it to those tangled, stuck places.

Content note: One of the issues McGavin shares throughout the book is a difficult relationship with her size and weight loss. While she does not repeat myths about weight causing health issues, it might still be triggering for people who struggle with their own size.

Available at bookshop.org.

“How We Show Up” by Mia Birdsong

November 30, 2025 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

Subtitle: Reclaiming Family, Friendship, and Community
Recommended to me by: Nora Samaran

This is a deeply hopeful book grounded in research and personal stories. The American Dream of individualism, resource extraction, and white supremacy creates separation and suffering. Mia Birdsong explores alternatives that people have created to value connection, cooperation, and community.

As a Black woman, Mia centers Black, queer women and other marginalized people such as people who have experienced homelessness. She appreciates the connections that people weave while surviving oppression, that can lead us all in a direction of ending oppression.

While the American Dream says that we should get our needs met in heterosexual nuclear families, this book celebrates all the different kinds of friendship that can also meet needs for intimacy, safety, and mutual support. Raising kids is easier and healthier for everyone with a larger circle of responsible and trusted adults. People who are ageing can support one another.

Whether in crisis, celebration, or everyday life, we can all weave more connections in our lives where we are seen and loved for who we are.

Highly recommended!

Author’s website. It turns out Mia Birdsong lives right here in Oakland!

Available at bookshop.org.

“What It Takes to Heal” by Prentis Hemphill

November 16, 2025 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

Subtitle: How transforming ourselves can change the world

I had to return this to the library before I finished the last few chapters, but it all rang true to me, with clear analysis of the effects of racism and trauma, and clear calls to action for the ways we can move forward and heal the damage. Making the world a better place requires both internal healing and external connections. The organizations working toward social justice struggle with healing the ways people interact with each other inside the organizations as well as taking action out in the world.

Prentis includes stories about their experiences with racism, as well as their experiences with organizing for a better world.

Highly recommended.

Author website: prentishemphill.com

Available at bookshop.org.

“Surviving Domestic Violence” by Elaine Weiss

September 8, 2025 by Sonia Connolly 1 Comment

Subtitle: Voices of Women Who Broke Free
Recommended to me by: Finding it in a Little Free Library

A compassionate and thorough look at how women get ensnared into abusive relationships with men, and how they get themselves out. Elaine Weiss includes her own story. She clarifies repeatedly that the abuse is not the victim/survivor’s fault, and there is no “type” of woman that is more vulnerable. Any woman can get into a relationship with an abusive person, and that’s what creates an abusive relationship.

The book was published in 2000, which only partially excuses its heterosexual and gendered lens. Yes, many abusive relationships are men abusing women. And some are not. This book could have also addressed queer relationships and women abusers in at least one of its examples.

The stories are also strongly biased toward the women finding loving marriages after leaving the abusive relationships. This supports the point that it’s not the women’s fault, but also pushes the narrative that a positive relationship is the ultimate goal and measure of success in healing.

It took me a long time to start reading the book after picking it up. And I did skim a couple of the stories where I didn’t want to read about the verbal abuse the woman was enduring. The bewildered teen looking around to see if anyone will tell her the abuse is wrong and not her fault breaks my heart. But I’m glad I did finally read the book. It is a great resource for people who carry stereotypes about who gets abused and why, both as bystanders and as people who have been abused themselves.

Available via Biblio.com.

“Too Flexible to Feel Good” by Celest Pereira and Adell Bridges

February 5, 2023 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

Subtitle: A Practical Roadmap to Managing Hypermobility

Recommended to me by: Andy

Celest Pereira and Adell Bridges explain hypermobility and how to address it with a mix of the latest neuroscience, cartoon characters, and photographs of themselves doing yoga poses and exercises.

They say that hypermobility spectrum disorder occurs in up to 25% of the population. They are addressing the mild-to-medium forms of the issue, not the extreme form which is Ehlers Danlos Syndrome. Hypermobile people have overly stretchy connective tissue, which causes issues not just with their joints, but also with proprioception (sensing one’s own body), digestion, and anxiety.

It makes sense that hypermobile people are drawn to yoga where they can be immediately successful, but it is also easy to practice yoga in a way that causes injuries. This book has a series of explanations and exercises on how to add strength and core support to protect joints prone to overstretching.

They call for mindfulness and careful experimentation to find what works best for each body. They advocate for using active range of motion, going as far as muscles can take you on their own, rather than passive range of motion, pulling yourself deeper into stretches by force. For example, seated forward bend with hands reaching forward, rather than with hands around feet pulling you further into the stretch.

I appreciated concrete permission not to hold still in a pose if my body is done with it, not to pull my shoulder blades down when I’m reaching my arms up, and not to pull myself deeper into stretches. I didn’t feel like I was quite the target market for this book, because I don’t need cartoon characters to lighten up neuroscience, and I do a little yoga and a lot of other kinds of exercise. I might be mildly hypermobile, but I’m not a yoga superstar.

Recommended if you’re hypermobile (they have a few easy movements to check), do a lot of yoga, and want to get stronger and more aligned to protect your joints. Mindfulness and body awareness can help us all.

Available at bookshop.org.

“Ask for Horses” by Tina Tau

December 24, 2022 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

Subtitle: Memoir of a Dream-Guided Life

Recommended to me by: The author is a friend

This book is both honest and kind. It looks directly at hard times and painful emotions, and maintains enough buoyancy and narrative flow to carry the reader forward without getting mired in pain. It holds the tension between personal autonomy and spiritual direction inclusively, without needing to choose one or the other. It looks tenderly at mistakes and stuck places, holding compassion for younger selves that were doing the best they could.

The included dreams are brief, powerful, mysterious. They are interpreted with gentle curiosity, an eye toward word play, and a willingness to explore new paths. “Dreams tell you something you don’t already know.” There are no fixed interpretations of dream symbols, and the dreamer is always in charge. Other people helping with a dream say, “If this were my dream,” offering rather than imposing interpretations.

The book pulled me through it, and I felt accompanied in some of my own life struggles. Recommended!

Available at Kelson Books and bookshop.org.