Here, for the first time, is a layperson's explanation of polyvagal theory, an approach to mental health and well-being that has taken the clinical world by storm. A polyvagal approach to life is based on the knowledge that the autonomic nervous system is shaped by early experience and reshaped with ongoing experience. This short book will offer an overview for nonspecialists and provide a series of exercises and meditations (practices) that will allow listeners to tune into their nervous systems, providing calming prompts to build and strengthen ventral vagal connections.

We're all familiar with what depression can look like, but there's another, lesser‑known face to this illness. High functioning depression (HFD) doesn't conform to the image of depression that typically comes to mind. As a result, people with HFD often have no idea why they are suffering, or what to do about it. In High Functioning, Dr. Judith Joseph reveals that what we’re feeling is not simply “negativity” or stress, and radically shifts the way those of us with HFD see ourselves, empowering us with five simple tools to reclaim our lives from this widespread yet poorly understood condition.

Since Stephen Porges first proposed the Polyvagal Theory in 1994, its basic idea-that the level of safety we feel impacts our health and happiness-has radically shifted how researchers and clinicians approach trauma interventions and therapeutic interactions. Yet despite its wide acceptance, most of the writing on the topic has been obscured behind clinical texts and scientific jargon.

For those suffering chronic pain - even after years of surgery, rehabilitation, and medication - only one question matters: How do I find lasting relief? Doctors Levine and Philips offer several distinct mindfulness techniques for reconnecting with the body and allowing fear, frustration, and depression to release. Sounds True Practices are short downloadable audio sessions selected from our most popular courses.

Traumatic experiences leave a “living legacy” of effects that often persist for years and decades after the events are over. Historically, it has always been assumed that retelling the story of what happened would resolve these effects. However, survivors report a different experience: Telling and re-telling the story of what happened to them often reactivates their trauma responses, overwhelming them rather than resolving the trauma.

With war and violence flaring all over the world, many of us are left feeling vulnerable and utterly helpless. In this book Pema Chödrön draws on Buddhist teachings to explore the origins of aggression, hatred, and war, explaining that they lie nowhere but within our own hearts and minds. She goes on to explain that the way in which we as individuals respond to challenges in our everyday lives can either perpetuate a culture of violence or create a new culture of compassion.

The Internal Family Systems (IFS) model of psychotherapy is acclaimed for its power to help us recognize and integrate disparate parts of ourselves—a revolutionary course of treatment that can yield extraordinary results. But not all the work of IFS takes place in the confines of traditional therapy sessions. In this thoughtful and compassionate guide, Tamala Floyd, LCSW, gives listeners the resources to expand their "parts work" beyond the therapist's office and into daily life—where the real healing happens.

Do loving relationships end because couples lack communication skills, struggle to empathize, and fail to accommodate each other’s needs? That’s a common belief within and outside of the therapeutic world… but what if it’s all wrong? In You Are the One You’ve Been Waiting For, Dr. Richard Schwartz, the celebrated founder of Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy, offers a new way—a path toward courageous love that replaces the striving, dependent, and disconnected approach to solving relationship challenges.

Our overwhelmingly divisive socio-political climate is among the greatest challenges of our time. Not only in America but also internationally, it seems that almost every issue raises incredibly vocal oppositional views. Not least of all, the arising of vast networks of disinformation is a testament to our deepening rifts. With so much hostility, antagonism, cynicism, and discord, how can we mend the ruptures in our society?

This audiobook by Pema Chödrön, the renowned American Buddhist nun, offers short, stand-alone sections designed to help us cultivate compassion and awareness amid the challenges of daily living. More than a collection of thoughts for the day, Comfortable with Uncertainty offers a progressive program of spiritual study, leading the listener through essential concepts, themes, and practices on the Buddhist path.

What if addiction, dissociation, and other manifestations of trauma were not framed as diseases or disorders, but rather as adaptive methods of regulating the autonomic nervous system (ANS)? This book takes that approach, and guides listeners through twenty embodied practices that promote the rewiring of the ANS. By integrating the latest neuroscience from Stephen Porges's Polyvagal Theory with Eugene Gendlin's embodied felt sense, Jan Winhall's Felt Sense Polyvagal Model is a paradigm-shifting, deeply somatic approach to healing trauma and addiction.

Beloved Tibetan Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön has a unique gift for helping those of all faiths to work with their most difficult inner and outer challenges. In this supportive series of talks, listeners will join her at her best - showing us the way back to our wisest and most heartful selves. Here, Pema shares three simple, time-honored steps to practice when we are in pain or crisis.

Dr. Schwartz’s Internal Family Systems (IFS) model has been transforming psychology for decades. With No Bad Parts, you’ll learn why IFS has been so effective in areas such as trauma recovery, addiction therapy, and depression treatment - and how this new understanding of consciousness has the potential to radically change our lives.

The most successful and satisfied people on the planet have one thing in common: the ability to create and communicate clear, healthy boundaries. This ability is, hands down, the biggest game changer when it comes to creating a healthy, happy, self-determined life. In Boundary Boss, psychotherapist Terri Cole reveals a specific set of skills that can help you stop abandoning yourself for the sake of others (without guilt or drama) and get empowered to consciously take control of every aspect of your emotional, spiritual, physical, personal, and professional life.

Over the past two decades, Internal Family Systems (IFS) has transformed the practice of psychotherapy. With Introduction to Internal Family Systems, the creator of IFS presents the ideal layperson’s guide for understanding this empowering, effective, and non-pathologizing approach to self-discovery and healing. Here, Dr. Schwartz shares evidence, case studies, and self-care tools.

Ever since publication of The Polyvagal Theory in 2011, demand for information about this innovative perspective has been constant. Here Stephen W. Porges brings together his most important writings since the publication of that seminal work. At its heart, polyvagal theory is about safety. It provides an understanding that feeling safe is dependent on autonomic states, and that our cognitive evaluations of risk in the environment, including identifying potentially dangerous relationships, play a secondary role to our visceral reactions to people and places.

Since Stephen Porges first proposed the Polyvagal Theory in 1994, its basic idea-that the level of safety we feel impacts our health and happiness-has radically shifted how researchers and clinicians approach trauma interventions and therapeutic interactions. Yet despite its wide acceptance, most of the writing on the topic has been obscured behind clinical texts and scientific jargon.

When The Polyvagal Theory was published in 2011, it took the therapeutic world by storm, bringing Stephen Porges's insights about the autonomic nervous system to a clinical audience interested in understanding trauma, anxiety, depression, and other mental health issues. The book made accessible to clinicians and other professionals a polyvagal perspective that provided new concepts and insights for understanding human behavior. The perspective placed an emphasis on the important link between psychological experiences and physical manifestations in the body.

Here, for the first time, is a layperson's explanation of polyvagal theory, an approach to mental health and well-being that has taken the clinical world by storm. A polyvagal approach to life is based on the knowledge that the autonomic nervous system is shaped by early experience and reshaped with ongoing experience. This short book will offer an overview for nonspecialists and provide a series of exercises and meditations (practices) that will allow listeners to tune into their nervous systems, providing calming prompts to build and strengthen ventral vagal connections.

Secure Relating offers a refreshing and innovative approach to understanding and improving relationships in today's increasingly polarized world. Drawing on over thirty years of professional clinical experience, authors Ann Kelley, PhD and Sue Marriott, LCSW, CGP integrate modern attachment theory, relational neuroscience, and depth psychology into practical tools for deepening self-awareness and navigating closeness with strength in even the most challenging relationships.

This book offers therapists an integrated approach to adding a polyvagal foundation to their work with clients. With clear explanations of the organizing principles of Polyvagal theory, this complex theory is translated into clinician and client-friendly language. Using a unique autonomic mapping process designed to effectively track autonomic response patterns, this book presents practical ways to work with clients' experiences of connection.

It can be incredibly frustrating when your body reacts to situations in ways that you can’t control. But what if you could harness the same mechanisms that cause fear and panic to instead summon peace and spaciousness? In Befriending Your Nervous System, clinician Deb Dana offers practical advice and exercises for engaging with your subconscious nervous system responses for greater wellness and resilience.

Based on groundbreaking research and expert opinions, What Your Body Knows About Happiness will teach you: how to use your body to spark creativity; how to find joy through your senses; how changing your environment can improve your mood; the unexpected powers of diet, exercise, and sex; the ways your brain can resolve bodily pain; and how to create optimism through your body. Janice Kaplan explores the evidence showing that our feeling bodies are often smarter than our thinking minds.

Eva Mozes Kor experienced the horrors of the Nazi regime firsthand in Auschwitz, but what is even more remarkable is how she has come to terms with this. Forgive and Heal are the words of advice that she has passed on at every opportunity. She was just 10 years old when she was sent to Auschwitz. While her parents and two older sisters were murdered there, she and her sister Miriam were subjected to medical experiments at the hands of Dr. Joseph Mengele.

Are you experiencing physical or emotional symptoms that no one is able to explain? If so, you may be suffering a traumatic reaction to a past event, teaches Levine.

Deb Dana is the foremost translator of polyvagal theory into clinical practice. Here, in her third book on this groundbreaking theory, she provides therapists with a grab-bag of polyvagal-informed exercises for their clients, to use both within and between sessions. These exercises offer readily understandable explanations of the ways the autonomic nervous system directs daily living.

Healing the wounds of sexual trauma has long been considered by many psychotherapists to be one of the most challenging tasks a person will ever face. The good news, teaches Dr. Peter A. Levine, is that new and more effective tools are emerging. On Sexual Healing, Dr. Levine, a pioneer in the field of healing trauma, teaches you his innovative series of body-based practices to release the sexual trauma of your past.

Dopamine, “the molecule of more,” makes it easy to get stuck in a cycle of never being truly satisfied. It promises happiness, but can never deliver. That part is up to us. A more fulfilling life begins with training your brain to overcome the dopamine chase—and it’s easier than you think.

In this culmination of his life’s work, Peter A. Levine draws on his broad experience as a clinician, a student of comparative brain research, a stress scientist and a keen observer of the naturalistic animal world to explain the nature and transformation of trauma in the body, brain and psyche. In an Unspoken Voice is based on the idea that trauma is neither a disease nor a disorder, but rather an injury caused by fright, helplessness and loss that can be healed by engaging our innate capacity to self-regulate high states of arousal and intense emotions.

Grounded in the latest research on Parts Work and Internal Family Systems, and offering proven techniques from Frank’s clinical practice and personal challenges, this engaging guide is a user manual to your own mind—and presents a road map for finding peace, confidence, and a deeper understanding of who you truly are.