It's easy to lose ourselves in the busyness that surrounds us at the end of the year. The start of the new year is the perfect time to take a step back and create space for intentional reflection and rejuvenation. No matter your goals for the year ahead, the books below offer wisdom and inspiration as you set priorities and discover new ways to let your inner radiance shine.
Radiant Reads for Self-Transformation
Join Karen Walrond, author of The Lightmaker's Manifesto, in this intriguing investigation into how we can reclaim aging, cultivate joy, and resist ageism. In Radiant Rebellion, Walrond does a deep dive into dimensions of getting older, including health, beauty, spirituality, connection, adventure, and purpose. With wisdom from luminaries who light our way, she helps us radiantly rebel against the fads and assumptions that hold us back, redefine the adventure of getting older, and create a shining future of expanded potential. We might even raise a little hell while we're at it!
Alcohol isn't going to fix the systemic lack of support for mothers—and pretending it's the solution to surviving motherhood does more harm than good. Mommy Wine Culture is a symptom of a larger issue: the mental load of motherhood and a systemic lack of support for moms. Mixing research, cultural references, interviews, and the author's sobriety story, It's Not about the Wine reveals what's really plaguing mothers and offers tangible tips for evaluating your relationship to alcohol and lightening your load.
9781506489834c.jpeg?width=225&height=338&name=BL_BlackWomenIvoryTower_Cover)9781506489834c.jpeg)
Black women are heading to college in record numbers, and more and more Black women are teaching in higher education. But the very structure of higher education ensures that we're still treated as guests, outsiders to the institutional family—outnumbered and unwelcome. In Black Women, Ivory Tower, Dr. Jasmine Harris shares her own experiences attempting to be a Vassar girl and reckoning with a lack of legacy and agency. Moving beyond the "data points," Dr. Harris examines the day-to-day impacts on Black women as individuals, the longer-term consequences to our professional lives, and the generational costs to our entire families.
Nothing in Shannon Harris's secular upbringing prepared her to enter the world of conservative Christianity. Soon her husband's bestselling book I Kissed Dating Goodbye helped inspire a national purity movement, and Shannon's identity became "pastor's wife." The Woman They Wanted recounts the remarkable story of her courtship with Joshua Harris, her grappling with conservative Christianity's patriarchy and narrow definition of womanhood, and her journey to break free and reclaim a more authentic version of herself.
This Book Won't Make You Happy
Happiness is fleeting. And what if you don't even need it to live a life of peace and purpose? In This Book Won't Make You Happy, therapist Niro Feliciano offers a path to something much more achievable and abundantly more satisfying: contentment. By incorporating eight simple postures rooted in cognitive behavioral science and mindfulness practices into our daily routines, we can move away from anxiety and toward balance and calm. Through these practices we will overcome obstacles that hold us back from living full, meaningful, contented lives.
Fight, flee, or freeze: Are these our only options for responding to fear? In How Not to Be Afraid, Gareth Higgins addresses seven common fears and invites us to change the course of our stories through seven habits of hope rooted in Celtic spirituality. Pointing us toward tenderness, empathy, and gentle encounter with others and with our deepest fears, Higgins helps us discover that peace is the path to itself.
Inspired by the author's viral essay and TEDx Talk "You Don't Owe Anyone an Interaction," You Don't Owe Anyone combines personal stories and tangible solutions to free perfectionists from the weight of expectations. Caroline Garnet McGraw offers a compassionate witness and a wakeup call, inspiring us to move our life in new, positive directions. She shows us what it looks like to refuse to over-function in the old ways, empowering us to move past perfectionism to heal our hearts.
Creating the world you want to live in takes guts and grace and everything you've got. To heal the world, though, you've also got to find healing yourself. In Chingona, Mexican American activist, scholar, and podcast host Alma Zaragoza-Petty helps us claim our inner chingona, a Spanish term for "badass woman." Working for change while preserving her spirit, a chingona repurposes her pain for the good of the world. This work won't be easy. Imagining a just and healed world from the inside out will take dialing in to our chingona spirit. But by unleashing our inner badass, we join the righteous fight for dignity and justice for all.
Of all the human emotions, anger is probably the most misunderstood. Rage through the centuries has shown that anger can be a catalyst for change; it can also be a tool employed in fear by those resisting reform or trying to quell protests or advancements by other people. The Rise of Rage explores the nature of anger and conceptualizes it as a primary emotion triggered by frustrated attempts to achieve one's ends. Counselor and psychotherapist Julie Christiansen walks us through a ten-step process to effectively and safely resolve our angry feelings, helping to free us from this much-misunderstood emotion.
Radiant Reads for Spiritual Seekers
So many of us are leaving conservative faith traditions behind, rightly saying goodbye to toxic theology, bigotry, and harm. But in the process, we often lose our rhythm of gathering, prayer, and worship. With wit and practical guidance, What Makes You Bloom helps us create a new spiritual practice after our faith has fallen apart. Spiritual coach Kevin Miguel Garcia shows us how we can connect with the Divine already inside us and cultivate meaningful spiritual practices that help us heal from the past, tap into the present, and imagine a delicious future.
The Enneagram for Black Liberation
For too long, conversations about the Enneagram and its personality types have been centered on and by whiteness. In The Enneagram for Black Liberation, certified Enneagram teacher and trained psychotherapist Chichi Agorom reclaims the Enneagram as a powerful tool for Black women to rediscover our wholeness and worth that existed long before systems of supremacy told us we weren't enough. Centering freedom, ease, and rest for Black women, Agorom invites each of us to claim the Enneagram as our tool for resilience-building in the continued fight for liberation.
Western society too often trains women out of feeling innately confident in who we are and in the wisdom we hold inside. Instead, we are handed down a set of expectations about our bodies, our disposition, our religious identification, our sexual orientation, our mothering, and our career choices. In Gutsy, Dr. Leah Katz draws on her training as a psychologist and her experience leaving an ultra-Orthodox Jewish faith and culture to offer tools and insights for getting "unstuck" from society's unrealistic and often harmful expectations for women that we have adopted as our own. It's time to get gutsy and create the rich, vibrant life we have always wanted.
We all carry sexual shame. Whether we grew up in the repressive purity culture of American Evangelical Christianity or not, we've all been taught in subtle and not-so-subtle ways that sex (outside of very specific contexts) is taboo. Psychotherapist Matthias Roberts helps readers overcome their shame and determine their own definition of healthy sex. Define your sexual values on your own terms, overcome your shame, and start having great, healthy sex.
In the past decade, church attendance among US adults has decreased by more than 25 percent. Americans report leaving religious communities because of the institutions' hypocrisy and resistance to change or because of trauma they have experienced in those spaces. In Holy Runaways, Matthias Roberts reaches out to those who, like him, want to understand the religion they've run from and erect a new faith on firmer foundations. He suggests ways we can all contribute to a new system built on love—and a new home we can inhabit together.
In a culture that says bigger is better, it is subversive work to take tiny, lasting steps toward learning and growth. In 12 Tiny Things Ellie Roscher and Heidi Barr journey with us through twelve essential areas of life: space, work, spirituality, food, style, nature, communication, home, sensuality, creativity, learning, and community. In each of these areas, we are invited to take one tiny action that is sure to open up growth and renewal. By trying on one tiny thing at a time, you can slowly, deliberately, and playfully remember who you are. Together, we will reach and grow toward the sun.
Think minimalism means a perfectly curated, always tidy home? Think again. Drowning in tides of toys, overflowing closets, and a crazy schedule, Rachelle Crawford assumed you had to be naturally organized to keep a tidy living space. Then she found minimalism: the messy, real-life kind that is less about perfection and more about purpose. With empathy, grace, and humor, Crawford shares doable ways to own less and live more fully. Learn to become a more conscious consumer, create a capsule wardrobe, inspire family members to join you, free up more time for the things that matter, and create a tidy(ish) home.
To view all of our books and resources, visit broadleafbooks.com.
