{"id":217815,"date":"2022-10-10T22:12:37","date_gmt":"2022-10-11T02:12:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sph\/?page_id=217815"},"modified":"2022-11-06T23:27:04","modified_gmt":"2022-11-07T04:27:04","slug":"activist-lab-reading-list","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sph\/practice\/activist-lab\/about-the-activist-lab\/activist-lab-reading-list\/","title":{"rendered":"Activist Lab Reading List"},"content":{"rendered":"

We at the Activist Lab believe strongly in the power of reading. Reading is knowledge, and knowledge is power. This list holds a few of each of our favorite books that have affirmed or expanded our worldviews and inspired us to be better advocates, people, and agents of social change. Continue to check this page over the next few weeks as each of our team members adds their top picks. Take a look, and come talk to us about these books and others!<\/p>\n

Craig Andrade, Associate Dean for Practice and Director of the Activist Lab<\/h3>\n
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Emergent Strategy- adrienne maree brown<\/h6>
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Inspired by Octavia Butler’s explorations of our human relationship to change,\u00a0<\/span>Emergent Strategy<\/i><\/a>\u00a0is radical self-help, society-help, and planet-help designed to shape the futures we want to live. Change is constant. The world is in a continual state of flux. It is a stream of ever-mutating, emergent patterns. Rather than steel ourselves against such change, this book invites us to feel, map, assess, and learn from the swirling patterns around us in order to better understand and influence them as they happen. This is a resolutely materialist “spirituality” based equally on science and science fiction, a visionary incantation to transform that which ultimately transforms us.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Full Dissidence: Notes from an Uneven Playing Field- Howard Bryant<\/h6>
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Whether the issues are protest, labor, patriotism, or class division, it is clear that professional sports are no longer simply fun and games. Rather, the industry is a hotbed of fractures and inequities that reflect and even drive some of the most divisive issues in our country. The nine provocative and deeply personal essays in\u00a0<\/span>Full Dissidence<\/i><\/a>\u00a0confront the dangerous narratives that are shaping the current dialogue in sports and mainstream culture. The book is a reflection on a culture where African Americans continue to navigate the sharp edges of whiteness\u2014as citizens who are always at risk of being told, often directly from the White House, to go back to where they came from. The topics Howard Bryant takes on include the player-owner relationship, the militarization of sports, the myth of integration, the erasure of black identity as a condition of success, and the kleptocracy that has forced America to ask itself if its beliefs of freedom and democracy are more than just words.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/span>

My Grandmother's Hands- Resmaa Manakem<\/h6>
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In this groundbreaking book<\/a>, therapist Resmaa Menakem examines the damage caused by racism in America from the perspective of trauma and body-centered psychology.
\nThe body is where our instincts reside and where we fight, flee, or freeze, and it endures the trauma inflicted by the ills that plague society. Menakem argues this destruction will continue until Americans learn to heal the generational anguish of white supremacy, which is deeply embedded in all our bodies. Our collective agony doesn’t just affect African Americans. White Americans suffer their own secondary trauma as well. So do blue Americans\u2014our police.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Parable of the Sower- Octavia Butler<\/h6>
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When global climate change and economic crises lead to social chaos in the early 2020s, California becomes full of dangers, from pervasive water shortage to masses of vagabonds who will do anything to live to see another day. Fifteen-year-old Lauren Olamina lives inside a gated community with her preacher father, family, and neighbors, sheltered from the surrounding anarchy. In a society where any vulnerability is a risk, she suffers from hyperempathy, a debilitating sensitivity to others\u2019 emotions. Precocious and clear-eyed, Lauren must make her voice heard in order to protect her loved ones from the imminent disasters her small community stubbornly ignores. But what begins as a fight for survival soon leads to something much more: the birth of a new faith . . . and a startling vision of human destiny.<\/p>\n

Find this book here<\/a><\/p>\n

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Rosewater- Tade Thompson<\/h6>
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Rosewater<\/a> is a town on the edge. A community formed around the edges of a mysterious alien biodome, its residents comprise the hopeful, the hungry, and the helpless — people eager for a glimpse inside the dome or a taste of its rumored healing powers.<\/span>
\nKaaro is a government agent with a criminal past. He has seen inside the biodome, and doesn’t care to again — but when something begins killing off others like himself, Kaaro must defy his masters to search for an answer, facing his dark history and coming to a realization about a horrifying future.<\/span><\/p>\n

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David Jernigan, Associate Dean for Practice and Director of the Activist Lab<\/h3>\n

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Global Reach- Richard Barnet and Ronald M\u00fcller<\/h6>
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Global Reach<\/a> examines the role of multinational corporations in the economy of the world and their effect on governments, taxpayers, consumers, workers, and businessmen.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Kindred- Octavia Butler<\/h6>
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Dana, a modern black woman, is celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday with her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in California and transported to the antebellum South. Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner, is drowning, and Dana has been summoned to save him. Dana is drawn back repeatedly through time to the slave quarters, and each time the stay grows longer, more arduous, and more dangerous until it is uncertain whether or not Dana’s life will end, long before it has a chance to begin.<\/span><\/p>\n

Find this book here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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No Logo- Naomi Klein<\/h6>
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Equal parts cultural analysis, political manifesto, mall-rat memoir, and journalistic expos\u00e9,\u00a0<\/span>No Logo<\/i><\/a>\u00a0is the first book to put the new resistance into pop-historical and clear economic perspective. Naomi Klein tells a story of rebellion and self-determination in the face of our new branded world.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Reville for Radicals- Sault Alinsky<\/h6>
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Legendary community organizer Saul Alinsky inspired a generation of activists and politicians with\u00a0<\/span>Reveille for Radicals<\/a>, the original handbook for social change. Alinsky writes both practically and philosophically, never wavering from his belief that the American dream can only be achieved by an active democratic citizenship. First published in 1946 and updated in 1969 with a new introduction and afterword, this classic volume is a bold call to action that still resonates today.<\/span><\/p>\n

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The Front Runner- Patricia Nell Warren<\/h6>
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Harlan Brown is a tough, conservative track coach hiding from his past at a small college. Billy Sive is a brilliant young runner who is homosexual and doesn’t mind who knows it. When they fall in love, they enter a race against hate and prejudice which takes them to the ’76 Olympics and a shattering, shocking conclusion.<\/span><\/p>\n

Find this book here<\/a><\/p>\n

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Caroline McQuade, Activist Lab Operations Associate<\/h3>\n

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Are Prisons Obsolete?- Angela Y. Davis<\/h6>
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With her characteristic brilliance, grace and radical audacity, Angela Y. Davis has put the case for the latest abolition movement in American life: the abolition of the prison. As she quite correctly notes, American life is replete with abolition movements, and when they were engaged in these struggles, their chances of success seemed almost unthinkable. For generations of Americans, the abolition of slavery was sheerest illusion. Similarly, the entrenched system of racial segregation seemed to last forever, and generations lived in the midst of the practice, with few predicting its passage from custom. The brutal, exploitative (dare one say lucrative?) convict-lease system that succeeded formal slavery reaped millions to southern jurisdictions (and untold miseries for tens of thousands of men, and women). Few predicted its passing from the American penal landscape. Davis expertly argues how social movements transformed these social, political and cultural institutions, and made such practices untenable.<\/span><\/p>\n

In Are Prisons Obsolete<\/a>?, Professor Davis seeks to illustrate that the time for the prison is approaching an end. She argues forthrightly for “decarceration”, and argues for the transformation of the society as a whole.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Being Heumann- Judy Heumann<\/h6>
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A story of fighting to belong in a world that wasn\u2019t built for all of us and of one woman\u2019s activism\u2014from the streets of Brooklyn and San Francisco to inside the halls of Washington\u2014<\/span>Being Heumann<\/i><\/a>\u00a0recounts Judy Heumann\u2019s lifelong battle to achieve respect, acceptance, and inclusion in society.<\/span><\/p>\n

Paralyzed from polio at eighteen months, Judy\u2019s struggle for equality began early in life. From fighting to attend grade school after being described as a \u201cfire hazard\u201d to later winning a lawsuit against the New York City school system for denying her a teacher\u2019s license because of her paralysis, Judy\u2019s actions set a precedent that fundamentally improved rights for disabled people.<\/span><\/p>\n

As a young woman, Judy rolled her wheelchair through the doors of the US Department of Health, Education, and Welfare in San Francisco as a leader of the Section 504 Sit-In, the longest takeover of a governmental building in US history. Working with a community of over 150 disabled activists and allies, Judy successfully pressured the Carter administration to implement protections for disabled peoples\u2019 rights, sparking a national movement and leading to the creation of the Americans with Disabilities Act.<\/span><\/p>\n

Candid, intimate, and irreverent, Judy Heumann\u2019s memoir about resistance to exclusion invites readers to imagine and make real a world in which we all belong.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century- Alice Wong<\/h6>
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One in five people in the United States lives with a disability. Some disabilities are visible, others less apparent\u2014but all are underrepresented in media and popular culture. Activist Alice Wong brings together this urgent, galvanizing collection of contemporary essays by disabled people,\u00a0just in time for the thirtieth anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act,<\/span><\/p>\n

From Harriet McBryde Johnson\u2019s account of her debate with Peter Singer over her own personhood to original pieces by authors like Keah Brown and Haben Girma; from blog posts, manifestos, and eulogies to Congressional testimonies, and beyond: this anthology gives a glimpse into the rich complexity of the disabled experience, highlighting the passions, talents, and everyday lives of this community. It invites readers to question their own understandings. It celebrates and documents disability culture in the now. It looks to the future and the past with hope and love.<\/span><\/p>\n

Find this book here.\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n

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Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good- adrienne maree brown<\/h6>
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How do we make social justice the most pleasurable human experience? How can we awaken within ourselves desires that make it impossible to settle for anything less than a fulfilling life? Author and editor adrienne maree brown finds the answer in something she calls “pleasure activism,” a politics of healing and happiness that explodes the dour myth that changing the world is just another form of work. Drawing on the black feminist tradition, she challenges us to rethink the ground rules of activism. Her mindset-altering essays are interwoven with conversations and insights from other feminist thinkers, including Audre Lorde, Joan Morgan, Cara Page, Sonya Renee Taylor, and Alexis Pauline Gumbs. Together they cover a wide array of subjects–from sex work to climate change, from race and gender to sex and drugs–building new narratives about how politics can feel good and how what feels good always has a complex politics of its own.<\/span><\/p>\n

Find this book here.\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n

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This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate- Naomi Klein<\/h6>
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In short, either we embrace radical change ourselves or radical changes will be visited upon our physical world. The status quo is no longer an option.<\/span><\/p>\n

In\u00a0This Changes Everything<\/a>\u00a0<\/i>Naomi Klein argues that climate change isn\u2019t just another issue to be neatly filed between taxes and health care. It\u2019s an alarm that calls us to fix an economic system that is already failing us in many ways. Klein meticulously builds the case for how massively reducing our greenhouse emissions is our best chance to simultaneously reduce gaping inequalities, re-imagine our broken democracies, and rebuild our gutted local economies. She exposes the ideological desperation of the climate-change deniers, the messianic delusions of the would-be geoengineers, and the tragic defeatism of too many mainstream green initiatives. And she demonstrates precisely why the market has not\u2014and cannot\u2014fix the climate crisis but will instead make things worse, with ever more extreme and ecologically damaging extraction methods, accompanied by rampant disaster capitalism.<\/p>\n

Klein argues that the changes to our relationship with nature and one another that are required to respond to the climate crisis humanely should not be viewed as grim penance, but rather as a kind of gift\u2014a catalyst to transform broken economic and cultural priorities and to heal long-festering historical wounds. And she documents the inspiring movements that have already begun this process: communities that are not just refusing to be sites of further fossil fuel extraction but are building the next, regeneration-based economies right now.<\/p>\n

Can we pull off these changes in time? Nothing is certain. Nothing except that climate change changes everything. And for a very brief time, the nature of that change is still up to us.<\/p>\n

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Paige Leiser, Activist Lab Student Engagement Intern<\/h3>\n

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The Book of Joy: Lasting Happiness in a Changing World- Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu<\/h6>
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Nobel Peace Prize Laureates His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu have survived more than fifty years of exile and the soul-crushing violence of oppression. Despite their hardships\u2014or, as they would say, because of them\u2014they are two of the most joyful people on the planet.<\/span><\/p>\n

In April 2015, Archbishop Tutu traveled to the Dalai Lama’s home in Dharamsala, India, to celebrate His Holiness’s eightieth birthday and to create what they hoped would be a gift for others. They looked back on their long lives to answer a single burning question: How do we find joy in the face of life’s inevitable suffering?<\/span><\/p>\n

They traded intimate stories, teased each other continually, and shared their spiritual practices. By the end of a week filled with laughter and punctuated with tears, these two global heroes had stared into the abyss and despair of our time and revealed how to live a life brimming with joy.<\/span><\/p>\n

This book offers us a rare opportunity to experience their astonishing and unprecendented week together, from the first embrace to the final good-bye.<\/span><\/p>\n

We get to listen as they explore the Nature of True Joy and confront each of the Obstacles of Joy\u2014from fear, stress, and anger to grief, illness, and death. They then offer us the Eight Pillars of Joy, which provide the foundation for lasting happiness. Throughout, they include stories, wisdom, and science. Finally, they share their daily Joy Practices that anchor their own emotional and spiritual lives.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Archbishop has never claimed sainthood, and the Dalai Lama considers himself a simple monk. In this unique collaboration, they offer us the reflection of real lives filled with pain and turmoil in the midst of which they have been able to discover a level of peace, of courage, and of joy to which we can all aspire in our own lives.<\/span><\/p>\n

Find this book here.<\/a><\/p>\n

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Dreams From My Father- Barack Obama<\/h6>
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In this lyrical, unsentimental, and compelling memoir, the son of a black African father and a white American mother searches for a workable meaning to his life as a black American. It begins in New York, where Barack Obama learns that his father\u2014a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man\u2014has been killed in a car accident. This sudden death inspires an emotional odyssey\u2014first to a small town in Kansas, from which he retraces the migration of his mother\u2019s family to Hawaii, and then to Kenya, where he meets the African side of his family, confronts the bitter truth of his father\u2019s life, and at last reconciles his divided inheritance.<\/span><\/p>\n

Find this book here.<\/a><\/p>\n

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Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City- Matthew Desmond<\/h6>
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In\u00a0<\/span>Evicted<\/i><\/a>, Princeton sociologist and MacArthur \u201cGenius\u201d Matthew Desmond follows eight families in Milwaukee as they each struggle to keep a roof over their heads. Hailed as \u201cwrenching and revelatory\u201d (<\/span>The Nation<\/i>), \u201cvivid and unsettling\u201d (<\/span>New York Review of Books<\/i>),\u00a0<\/span>Evicted\u00a0<\/i>transforms our understanding of poverty and economic exploitation while providing fresh ideas for solving one of twenty-first-century America\u2019s most devastating problems. Its unforgettable scenes of hope and loss remind us of the centrality of home, without which nothing else is possible.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks- Rebecca Skloot<\/h6>
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Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells\u2014taken without her knowledge\u2014became one of the most important tools in medicine. The first \u201cimmortal\u201d human cells grown in culture, they are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. If you could pile all HeLa cells ever grown onto a scale, they\u2019d weigh more than 50 million metric tons\u2014as much as a hundred Empire State Buildings. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the atom bomb\u2019s effects; helped lead to important advances like in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping; and have been bought and sold by the billions.<\/span><\/p>\n

Yet Henrietta Lacks remains virtually unknown, buried in an unmarked grave.<\/span><\/p>\n

Now Rebecca Skloot takes us on an extraordinary journey, from the \u201ccolored\u201d ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s to stark white laboratories with freezers full of HeLa cells; from Henrietta\u2019s small, dying hometown of Clover, Virginia\u2014a land of wooden slave quarters, faith healings, and voodoo\u2014to East Baltimore today, where her children and grandchildren live and struggle with the legacy of her cells.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Henrietta\u2019s family did not learn of her \u201cimmortality\u201d until more than twenty years after her death, when scientists investigating HeLa began using her husband and children in research without informed consent. And though the cells had launched a multimillion-dollar industry that sells human biological materials, her family never saw any of the profits. As Rebecca Skloot so brilliantly shows, the story of the Lacks family\u2014past and present\u2014is inextricably connected to the dark history of experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics, and the legal battles over whether we control the stuff we are made of.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Over the decade it took to uncover this story, Rebecca became enmeshed in the lives of the Lacks family\u2014especially Henrietta\u2019s daughter Deborah, who was devastated to learn about her mother\u2019s cells. She was consumed with questions: Had scientists cloned her mother? Did it hurt her when researchers infected her cells with viruses and shot them into space? What happened to her sister, Elsie, who died in a mental institution at the age of fifteen? And if her mother was so important to medicine, why couldn\u2019t her children afford health insurance?\u00a0<\/span>
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\nIntimate in feeling, astonishing in scope, and impossible to put down,\u00a0<\/span>The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks<\/em><\/a>\u00a0captures the beauty and drama of scientific discovery, as well as its human consequences.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man- Emmanuel Acho<\/h6>
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\u201cYou cannot fix a problem you do not know you have.\u201d So begins Emmanuel Acho in his essential guide to the truths Americans need to know to address the systemic racism that has recently electrified protests in all fifty states. \u201cThere is a fix,\u201d Acho says. \u201cBut in order to access it, we\u2019re going to have to have some uncomfortable conversations.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

In\u00a0<\/span>Uncomfortable Conversations With a Black Man<\/i><\/a>, Acho takes on all the questions, large and small, insensitive and taboo, many white Americans are afraid to ask\u2014yet which all Americans need the answers to, now more than ever. With the same open-hearted generosity that has made his video series a phenomenon, Acho explains the vital core of such fraught concepts as white privilege, cultural appropriation, and \u201creverse racism.\u201d In his own words, he provides a space of compassion and understanding in a discussion that can lack both. He asks only for the reader\u2019s curiosity\u2014but along the way, he will galvanize all of us to join the antiracist fight.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Sakshi Dewani, Activist Lab Research Assistant<\/h3>\n

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All the Things We Don't Talk About- Amy Feltman<\/h6>
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Morgan Flowers just wants to hide. Raised by their neurodivergent father, Morgan has grown up haunted by the absence of their mysterious mother Zoe, especially now, as they navigate their gender identity and the turmoil of first love. Their father Julian has raised Morgan with care, but he can\u2019t quite fill the gap left by the dazzling and destructive Zoe, who fled to Europe on Morgan\u2019s first birthday. And when Zoe is dumped by her girlfriend Brigid, she suddenly comes crashing back into Morgan and Julian\u2019s lives, poised to disrupt the fragile peace they have so carefully cultivated.<\/span><\/p>\n

Through it all, Julian and Brigid have become unlikely pen-pals and friends, united by the knowledge of what it\u2019s like to love and lose Zoe; they both know that she hasn\u2019t changed. Despite the red flags, Morgan is swiftly drawn into Zoe\u2019s glittering orbit and into a series of harmful missteps, and Brigid may be the only link that can pull them back from the edge. A story of betrayal and trauma alongside queer love and resilience, ALL THE THINGS WE DON\u2019T TALK ABOUT<\/a> is a celebration of and a reckoning with the power and unintentional pain of a thoroughly modern family.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Help Others, Do Work that Matters, and Make Smarter Choices about Giving Back- William Macaskill<\/h6>
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While a researcher at Oxford, William MacAskill decided to devote his study to a simple question: How can we do good better? MacAskill realized that, while most of us want to make a difference, we often decide how to do so based on assumptions and emotions rather than facts. As a result, our good intentions often lead to ineffective, sometimes downright harmful, outcomes.<\/span>
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\nAs an antidote, MacAskill and his colleagues developed effective altruism\u2014a practical, data-driven approach to doing good that allows us to make a tremendous difference regardless of our resources. Effective altruists operate by asking certain key questions that force them to think differently, set aside biases, and use evidence and careful reasoning rather than act on impulse. In\u00a0<\/span>Doing Good<\/i>\u00a0<\/span>Better<\/i><\/a>, MacAskill lays out these principles and shows that, when we use them correctly\u2014when we apply the head and the heart to each of our altruistic endeavors\u2014each of us has the power to do an astonishing amount of good.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities- Rebecca Solnit<\/h6>
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A book as powerful and influential as Rebecca Solnit’s\u00a0<\/span>Men Explain Things to Me<\/em>, her\u00a0<\/span>Hope in the Dark\u00a0<\/span><\/em><\/a>was written to counter the despair of radicals at a moment when they were focused on their losses and had turned their back to the victories behind them–and the unimaginable changes soon to come. In it, she makes a radical case for hope as a commitment to act in a world whose future remains uncertain and unknowable. Drawing on her decades of activism and a wide reading of environmental, cultural, and political history, Solnit argued that radicals have a long, neglected history of transformative victories, that the positive consequences of our acts are not always immediately seen, directly knowable, or even measurable, and that pessimism and despair rest on an unwarranted confidence about what is going to happen next. Now, with a moving new introduction explaining how the book came about and a new afterword that helps teach us how to hope and act in our unnerving world, she brings a new illumination to the darkness of 2016 in an unforgettable new edition of this classic book.<\/span><\/p>\n

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The Health Gap: The Challenge of an Unequal World- Michael Marmot<\/h6>
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In Baltimore’s inner-city neighborhood of Upton\/Druid Heights, a man’s life expectancy is sixty-three; not far away, in the Greater Roland Park\/Poplar neighborhood, life expectancy is eighty-three. The same twenty-year avoidable disparity exists in the Calton and Lenzie neighborhoods of Glasgow, and in other cities around the world.<\/span><\/p>\n

In Sierra Leone, one in 21 fifteen-year-old women will die in her fertile years of a maternal-related cause; in Italy, the figure is one in 17,100; but in the United States, which spends more on healthcare than any other country in the world, it is one in 1,800 (and now, with the new administration chipping away at Obamacare, the statistics stand to grow even more devastating). Why?<\/span><\/p>\n

Dramatic differences in health are not a simple matter of rich and poor; poverty alone doesn’t drive ill health, but inequality does. Indeed, suicide, heart disease, lung disease, obesity, and diabetes, for example, are all linked to social disadvantage. In every country, people at relative social disadvantage suffer health disadvantage and shorter lives. Within countries, the higher the social status of individuals, the better their health. These health inequalities defy the usual explanations. Conventional approaches to improving health have emphasized access to technical solutions and changes in the behavior of individuals, but these methods only go so far. What really makes a difference is creating the conditions for people to have control over their lives, to have the power to live as they want. Empowerment is the key to reducing health inequality and thereby improving the health of everyone. Marmot emphasizes that the rate of illness of a society as a whole determines how well it functions; the greater the health inequity, the greater the dysfunction.<\/span><\/p>\n

Marmot underscores that we have the tools and resources materially to improve levels of health for individuals and societies around the world, and that to not do so would be a form of injustice. Citing powerful examples and startling statistics (\u201cyoung men in the U.S. have less chance of surviving to sixty than young men in forty-nine other countries\u201d),\u00a0<\/span>The Health Gap<\/i><\/a>\u00a0presents compelling evidence for a radical change in the way we think about health and indeed society, and inspires us to address the societal imbalances in power, money, and resources that work against health equity.<\/span><\/p>\n

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The Mountain is You- Brianna West<\/h6>
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Coexisting but conflicting needs create self-sabotaging behaviors. This is why we resist efforts to change, often until they feel completely futile. But by extracting crucial insight from our most damaging habits, building emotional intelligence by better understanding our brains and bodies, releasing past experiences at a cellular level, and learning to act as our highest potential future selves, we can step out of our own way and into our potential. For centuries, the mountain has been used as a metaphor for the big challenges we face, especially ones that seem impossible to overcome. To scale our mountains, we actually have to do the deep internal work of excavating trauma, building resilience, and adjusting how we show up for the climb. In the end, it is not the mountain we master, but ourselves.<\/span><\/p>\n

Find this book here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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