MY TOP books for spiritual, Emotional & psychological growth
Client’s regularly ask me for book recommendations to support their inner work so I’ve finally made a list of my favorite books for those on The Path of emotional, psychological and spiritual growth. Even just reading one of these books will change your life!
There’s a wide range here from psycho-education to spiritual guidance, from poetry to personal memoirs, and from relationship wisdom to keen instruction on how to rise into one’s healthy maturity. These are great for both beginners starting their personal growth and for the seasoned ones looking to deepen their spiritual journey of becoming. Feel free to share with friends. Enjoy!
HOW TO BE AN ADULT: A Handbook on Psychological and Spiritual Integration
by David Richo
This is the #1 book I recommend to clients looking to deepen their personal growth and healing. I personally re-read it almost every year and still get so much out of it. If you are serious about finding the kind of power, peace and freedom that is a result of taking responsibility for your life, this is your book. It’s slender but jam-packed with useful instructions on how to rise into your healthy maturity and upgrade your relationships out of codependency into interdependency. From the publisher: this book is “filled with checklists, diagrams, and literary quotations for meditation, making this a book to read and digest a little at a time for best results. How to Be an Adult will guide readers on their positive journey from fear, through power, to love.”
Us: Getting Past You and Me to Build a More Loving Relationship by Terry Real
Terry Real is one of my favorite voices on relationships these days. His work is clear, practical, direct and helpful in transforming dysfunctional relationships into healthy ones.
At a time when toxic individualism is rending our society at every level, bestselling author and renowned marriage counselor Terrence Real sees how it poisons intimate relationships in his therapy practice, where he works with couples on the brink of disaster. The good news: Warmer, closer, more passionate relationships are possible if you have the right tools.
In his transformative book Us, Real brilliantly observes how our winner-takes-all culture infiltrates families with devastating results: repetitive fights that go nowhere, or a distant relationship in which partners end up living “alone together.” With deft insight, humor, and charm, Real guides you to transform your relationship into one that’s based on compassion, collaboration, and closeness.
Liberated Love: Release Codependent Patterns and Create the Love You Desire by Mark Groves and Kylie McBeath
Groves and McBeath’s work―through their Create the Love seminars, workbooks, and consultation programs―have educated a new generation of relationship seekers on the best ways to practice and cultivate love. In Liberated Love, you’ll explore your original relationship blueprint and learn how it informs your current relationships (spoiler alert: it’s often a pretty direct line), and discover how limitation can be the key to finding freedom and experiencing full, fully-realized love with another person.
Equipped with real-life situations and stories, exercises, rituals, and tools that lead to productive self-examination, Groves and McBeath illuminate how to be aware of our most instinctual defenses, survival strategies, and coping mechanisms, how to have conversations about relationships without turning them into “relationship conversations,” and how to date in a way that protects your heart as you open it up to new possibilities.
How to Be an Adult in Relationships: The Five Keys to Mindful Loving by David Richo
This invaluable book on healthy, conscious relationships is a close runner up to his original How To Be An Adult. Relationships are some of the richest places of growth, and they are often the source of a lot of conflict, hurt and confusion as well. This work by Richo is such an important handbook on how to level-up the ways we navigate our relationships. If you find yourself struggling in your relationship, or you want to avoid repeating destructive patterns in them, or you simply want to find ways to improve how you meet your partner, this is going to be extremely useful for you. Another top recommendation that I share with friends and clients alike to help them upgrade their relationships out of codependency into healthy, thriving interdependency.
How to Love Better: The Path to Deeper Connection Through Growth, Kindness, and Compassion BY YUNG PUEBLO
In How to Love Better, Yung Pueblo examines all aspects of relationships, from the rose-colored early days when you may be hesitant to show your full self, to the challenges that can arise without clear communication, to dealing with heartbreak and healing as you close a chapter of your life. The power of looking inward remains at the core of Yung Pueblo’s teachings. Ego and attachment can become barriers in a relationship, so the more self-aware you become, the more you can support both your partner and yourself.
How to Love Better includes:
• How to build harmony in a relationship
• How to see each other’s perspective
• How to find the right partner
• How to heal from heartbreak
• How to overcome attachment
• How to form commitments
• How to argue
Journey of the Heart: The Path of Conscious Love by John Welwood
For the spiritual practitioners who want to use the material that arises within their relationships as fuel for awakening and healing. This is a recent addition to the list and quickly became a favorite text in my quest to understand and embody conscious love in relationship.
From the author - We can begin to cultivate a new spirit of engagement between the sexes by recognizing and welcoming the powerful opportunity that intimate relationships provide-to awaken to our deeper nature. Yet this also presents a tremendous challenge, for it means undertaking a journey in search of who we really are. Our connection with someone we love is one of the best vehicles for this journey. When we invite love to awaken us to the deeper powers of life, then working with its challenges becomes part of an ongoing adventure. Intimacy becomes a path --an unfolding process of discovery and revelation. And relationship becomes, for the first time, conscious. — John Welwood
It's Not You: Identifying and Healing from Narcissistic People by Dr. Ramani Durvasula
So many of us have struggled with people who have narcissistic traits. My practice is filled with women in particular who have suffered in relationships with narcissistic men. It seems we need more awareness as a collective about narcissistic abuse and how to recover from it. Dr. Ramani is an excellent resource for this topic.
It’s not always easy to tell when you’re dealing with a narcissistic person. One day they draw you in with their charm and charisma, the next they gaslight you, wreck your self-esteem, and leave you wondering, What should I have done differently? As Dr. Ramani explains in It’s Not You, the answer is: absolutely nothing.
Just as a tiger can’t change its stripes, a narcissist will not stop manipulating and invalidating you, no matter how much you try to appease them. The first step toward healing from their toxic influence—and to protect yourself from future harm—is to accept that you are not to blame for their behavior.
Drawing on more than two decades of studying the landscape of narcissism and working with survivors, Dr. Ramani explores how narcissists hijack our well-being and offers a healing path forward.
The Origins of You: How Breaking Family Patterns Can Liberate the Way We Live and Love by Vienna PharAon
Understanding why we behave the way we do is the first step on the path of personal growth. Vienna helps us understand the 5 most common origin wounds that become the root of all of our unconscious, destructive, and limiting behaviors in a very accessible and engaging way. Want to better understand they “why’s” of your behavior in relationships and work toward transforming unhealthy patterns into healthier ones? This is an excellent place to start.
WOMEN WHO RUN WITH THE WOLVES by Clarissa Pinkola Estés
At some point in her journey, every woman needs to take a long walk with this book. I’ve read different chapters at various stages of my life and it always has something new to offer me. I find so much resonance with the stories and archetypes shared in this collection of stories and they help me make sense of my journey and struggles. Curl up in bed on a rainy evening and let her tell you a story. You will undoubtedly relate to these universal myths and her poetic explanations of them and it will help you understand the arc of your life’s journey. My copy is completely worn, fully dogeared and with notes written on almost every page for a reason.
Men's Work: A Practical Guide to Face Your Darkness, End Self-Sabotage, and Find Freedom By Connor Beaton
In Men’s Work, ManTalks founder Connor Beaton offers the tactical, self-led guide men have been looking for. Here, he destigmatizes inner work by reframing it as a kind of psychological warrior training that many men can relate to and have been craving. Beaton walks you through a framework for facing the hidden and rejected aspects of yourself―factors that lead to self-sabotage, anxiety, and depression.
From the Core: A New Masculine Paradigm for Leading with Love, Living Your Truth, and Healing the World by john wineland
• Get strong―go beyond building your muscles to strengthening your nervous system, awareness, and ability to conduct energy
• Become masterful in the art of sexual and energetic polarity
• Align with the Sacred Feminine―operate in harmony and trust with the feminine forces within you and in others
• Take responsibility for the life you’ve created, the legacy of manhood, and your personal role in healing our damaged world
• Prioritize depth over comfort―becoming highly attuned to the truth of your heart and the power of your intention
• Use the Eleven Precepts of Conscious Warriorhood as your life’s compass
The Five Things We Cannot Change: And the Happiness We Find by Embracing Them by David Richo
There are certain facts of life that we cannot change—the unavoidable “givens” of human existence: (1) everything changes and ends, (2) things do not always go according to plan, (3) life is not always fair, (4) pain is a part of life, and (5) people are not loving and loyal all the time. Richo shows us that by dropping our deep-seated resistance to these givens, we can find liberation and discover the true richness that life has to offer.
As always, I appreciate Richo’s sober, compassionate and very practical approach to help us embrace the truths of living and loving.
Untamed by Glennon Doyle
It’s as good as everyone says it is! Better, even. I cried, I laughed, I felt seen and celebrated. It is good, good medicine. I would file this under the category of books that give you permission to be your wild, unreserved, courageous full Self, while making space for you to own and release the feelings you might struggle to name. “Soulful and uproarious, forceful and tender, Untamed is both an intimate memoir and a galvanizing wake-up call. It is the story of how one woman learned that a responsible mother is not one who slowly dies for her children, but one who shows them how to fully live. It is the story of navigating divorce, forming a new blended family, and discovering that the brokenness or wholeness of a family depends not on its structure but on each member’s ability to bring her full self to the table. And it is the story of how each of us can begin to trust ourselves enough to set boundaries, make peace with our bodies, honor our anger and heartbreak, and unleash our truest, wildest instincts so that we become women who can finally look at ourselves and say: There She Is.
Untamed shows us how to be brave. As Glennon insists: The braver we are, the luckier we get.”
Falling in Love with Where You Are: A Year of Prose and Poetry on Radically Opening Up to the Pain and Joy of Life by Jeff Foster
“As we open up to life and love and each other, as we awaken from our dream of separation, we encounter not just the bliss of existence, but its pain, too; not only life’s ecstasy, but also its agony. Healing doesn’t always feel good or comfortable or even “spiritual,” for we are inevitably forced to confront our shadows, fears, and deepest longings—those secret parts of ourselves that we have denied, repressed, or deemed “negative” and unworthy of our love. How can we find the calm in the midst of the storm? How can we rest, even as the ground falls? Falling in Love with Where You Are invites you to discover a deep YES to your life, no matter what you are going through; to see crisis as an opportunity to heal, pain as an intelligent messenger, and your imperfections as perfectly placed.” Jeff Foster is a top favorite these days and I always keep one of his books next to my bathtub to soak with.
CONSOLATIONS: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words by DAVID WHYTE
This collection of prose is pure beauty. A perfect companion to keep on the nightstand or accompany you on a trip. I reach for it often to read one of his short essays on a topic that feels alive to me and it always helps me anchor into the beauty of this delicate and wild human journey. “Beginning with ALONE and closing with WORK, each chapter is a meditation on meaning and context, an invitation to shift and broaden our perspectives on the inevitable vicissitudes of life: pain and joy, honesty and anger, confession and vulnerability, the experience of feeling besieged and the desire to run away from it all. Through this lens, procrastination may be a necessary ripening; hiding an act of freedom; and shyness the appropriate confusion and helplessness that accompanies the first stage of revelation.”
Queen Owl Wings: A Collection of Poems by Jeannette Encinias
I am so in love with this book of poetry by Jeannette Encinias. It is rare that I can turn to any page and find something that immediately helps me transcend the mundane and tap into how gorgeous and precious this life is. It lives on my nightstand and is a reliable source of wisdom and beauty.
Prayers of Honoring Grief by Pixie Lighthorse
Is it possible for a book to save you from drowning? I think so. This book was one of the only things that helped keep my head above water during a very, very difficult time of grief and loss. Lighthorse has a way of transmitting the depth of grief, pain and suffering into words of solace and beauty. Each page is dedicated to a different flavor of grief. It has so much to offer.
Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice from Dear Sugar by Cheryl Strayed
When I couldn’t afford therapy, I turned to this book. When life gets hard flip through this book. When my friends are struggling and I want them to feel okay, I give them this book. When I want a bit of comfort or I need a reminder of the beauty that is embedded in the mundane, I pick up this book. Get yourself 2 copies, because you will inevitably want to give a copy away to someone you cherish.
The Way of Rest: Finding The Courage to Hold Everything in Love by Jeff Foster
Yes, another Jeff Foster book. I would suggest getting every single one of his books if I were you, they’re that good.