Healing

The Courage to Heal

Ellen Bass & Laura Davis · 1988

Written originally for survivors of childhood sexual abuse, this book has become a reference for anyone in a long healing process who needs permission to go at their own pace, to feel what they feel, and to trust that progress is happening even when it is invisible. It is compassionate and practical in equal measure.

Many Lives, Many Masters

Dr. Brian Weiss · 1988

A psychiatrist’s account of an unlikely journey into past-life regression that transformed both his patient and himself. Whatever your view of the subject, Weiss writes about the mind’s capacity for healing with a genuine wonder that tends to open something in readers who have hit a wall with more conventional approaches.

Braiding Sweetgrass

Robin Wall Kimmerer · 2013

Kimmerer, a botanist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, writes about the relationship between humans and the natural world as a form of reciprocal healing. For anyone whose own healing feels more possible outside than anywhere else, Kimmerer articulates why that might be, in language that is itself restorative.

The Invitation

Oriah Mountain Dreamer · 1999

Expanded from the poem of the same name, this book asks not what you have achieved but what you are willing to feel — to stay with, to witness in yourself without flinching. For those in the middle of healing work who need a companion that does not rush them toward resolution, Oriah offers patience and depth instead.

The Synergy Game

Georgia Clare · 2024

Georgia Clare wrote this book from inside her own healing, in the years after her thirty-four-year marriage ended, tracing the specific practices — writing, yoga, meditation, journalling, gratitude — that rebuilt a life she recognised as her own again. It is less a formula than a record of what actually worked, offered to anyone else currently in the middle of putting themselves back together.

The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry

Gabrielle Zevin · 2014

A grieving, closed-off bookseller has his life reopened by the unlikeliest arrival — a baby left in his shop. Zevin writes healing as something that mostly happens sideways, through people and stories you did not go looking for, rather than through anything you deliberately set out to fix.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

Mary Ann Shaffer & Annie Barrows · 2008

A community on a small island, recovering from wartime occupation, finds its way back to itself partly through a reading club formed almost by accident. It is a gentle, funny, ultimately moving argument that healing rarely happens alone, and that connection — even unexpected, even by letter — is most of the cure.

Quote Therapy

Georgia Clare

Georgia Clare’s own book, and the one this whole site grew from. It pairs great quotations with original stories of people who finally acted on a line someone else wrote, a warm reminder that the right words at the right moment can genuinely shift a life. Newly revised and expanded.