Here’s my complete reading list from 2022! From spirituality and philosophy, to literature, to family trauma, to business and manifestation. I hope you get some inspiration and find a few to add to your list!
Happy New Year, my friends!
1. Women Who Run With the Wolves, by Clarissa Pinkola Estés
I consider this the ultimate guide to creativity. It’s a big thick book of 500+ pages and it took me a long time to work my way through…
…But was honestly life changing. I wrote a blog post about awakening your creativity (inspired by this book) right here.
This woman’s life work is collecting stories from her own heritage (Mexican and Hungarian) as well as around the world, and digging into the symbolism behind them to help women get back to being WILD.
Not the tame, dulled down women society raises us to be.
But wild.
Expressive.
Creative.
All definitions which I use to describe power.
2. The Prophet, by Kahlil Gibran
Philosophy expressed in the form of poetry. I read this in an evening by a campfire, during my first camping trip of the year.
The message that impacted me the most was the duality of sadness and joy. They are two opposite spectrums of the same energy. So when we experience deep sadness, there is also deep joy once the totem tilts the other way.
And the deeper we feel the sadness when it’s with us, the deeper we feel the joy when it arrives. Holding feelings of sadness at bay is really holding feelings of joy at bay as well.
So embrace it all.
My masterclass Steadfast really gathers up all my learnings of this from this past year especially. I’ve gathered my teachings of how to truly experience all our feelings when it comes to business – especially the ones that come up when sales are slow.
3. Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self, by Alice Miller
This one’s a humdinger when it comes to childhood trauma. My takeaway from this book was how much my parents absorbed trauma from their parents, who absorbed trauma from their parents…and that’s why I experienced trauma from my parents.
It really opened my eyes to see that my parents aren’t bad people. That they simply didn’t have the courage to face and heal their traumas from their own parents, and that I and my siblings ~ unfortunately ~ bore the brunt of that.
This knowledge allows me to have compassion for them.
When my mom says something particularly hurtful,
I can remind myself that she’s hurting in the same way from the things her own mother said to her.
Even though it opens me up to compassion, it still makes me deeply sad to think about the long line of trauma that has been inherited from generation to generation within my family…and all our families.
I keep these feelings close, because it reminds me why my work is so important.
Helping my clients (who also help their clients) get back to the soul (the core of who they are) is the only way to strip away the ugly behaviors caused by unresolved trauma.
I like to define marketing and selling as tools for soul work.
Because when you’re launching an offer or promoting something, all the fears and self doubt and strong emotions boil up to the surface in an extremely intense way. It’s why so many people hate launching and selling – because those feelings are brutal!
But if you can learn to appreciate them as the tools that bring you closer to who you really are, you can learn to love launching and selling.
Let go of the ego and over-identifgying with your results, and embrace your business as a “greenhouse for your soul” (to quote Taki’h Antigoni Dhyandeepa).
Again, if this resonates, I recommend my free masterclass: Steadfast.
4. Wheels of Life, by Anodea Judith
I consider this the “Bible” of information about chakras. I haven’t finished reading it yet, because it’s practically as long as the Bible, but it has just about everything you could ever want to know about chakras.
I found the way she explains these concepts really simple and easy to digest, and it’s been helpful for me to use when I want to talk about energetic concepts with people who haven’t dabbled in them before.
So if you’re some kind of energetic coach and you have a hard time breaking down the concepts of these energy centers in the human body to explain to your clients, this could be a good one for you to find ways of explaining them to your clients.
Or if you’ve dabbled in chakra work and find it a helpful way to understand how energy works in our bodies, this would be a great place to delve into it.
5. How to Sell Anything to Anybody, by Joe Girard
I happened upon this one at a free library when I visited Bend, Oregon this summer, and I thought, “Lemme see what this car salesman from the 60’s has to say about selling.”
I quite honestly thought it was going to be cringy (and some of it was) but for the most part, I found myself pretty inspired! The guy actually focused on a lot of ways to get people in the door to his shop where he sold cars, and a lot of them were extremely creative!
It got my own mental wheels turning, as to how I can think of creative ways to take those “outdated” principles and see how I can revamp them for 2023 and bring new people into my online business in fun and unique ways.
One of the ways I came up with was building my own snail mail list!
So if you fancy getting some fun poems and art that’s focused around spirituality and marketing, handwritten by yours truly, just send me your name and physical address to my Insta account right here.
You’ll find something fun in your mailbox before ya know it!
6. Rich as F*ck, by Amanda Frances
Amanda Frances is definitely a path paver in the world of energetics and business. She has personally mentored several of the coaches I’ve learned from (and continue to learn from). And while her style of teaching and marketing is not really something I jive with, the concepts she teaches are incredible.
I believe we can look past the person delivering the message and focus on the message, if it’s something we need and want to learn.
The way she talks about money and manifestation are revolutionary, and I highly recommend this book to literally anyone – business owner or not.
7. The House of the Spirits, by Isabelle Allende
I secluded myself in my apartment (more specifically, my bed) for an entire weekend to read this novel. It takes on the traditional theme of many South American novels, by taking you through the entire history of a family, from matriarchal generation to generation.
It’s about a family of women who work with spirits in realms beyond this one, and how that impacts them and their families.
- It also tackles political and social themes like the caste system and the master/servant relationship.
- It deals with misogyny and infidelity and rape.
- As well as amplifying the way the women in the story deal with these behaviors in a way of power, even when they’re part of a society that gives them no rights at all.
I don’t read a lot of fiction nowadays because it just doesn’t captivate me the way it used to, but this story totally engrossed me for an entire weekend and I loved it.
8. Chinese Defense, by László Csiki
I grabbed this in a used bookstore in Budapest in March. It’s a Romanian writer who originally wrote the book in Hungarian, and it’s now translated into English.
He wrote this collection about the stifling (to put it politely) of freedom of speech in Romania during his career as a writer. He eventually had to leave Romania because his writing was “canceled” (as we would call it today) in Romania.
These stories take place in Transylvania, a region close to my own heart, and somewhere I’ve also spent a lot of time, even in this past year.
The one that stuck out to me the most was of a young man trying to survive and at the same time keep a bit of his personal ethics. He would often go days without food, but he had a pet rabbit that he took care of. And even though he would often not see any other humans during his periods without work (and hence, without food), he would talk to the rabbit to keep himself company.
He faces a conflict of whether to turn in the guy who gave him the rabbit (someone the police are frequently coming to his door trying to find), because he knows if he turns in his friend, his own economic situation would get considerably better.
I’m not sure what “opinion” to give about these stories, other than to tell you they give you a vivid visual of the internal struggle of resistance that goes in someone’s mind when they’re facing extreme oppression.
There are many of those regimes in place today, so it’s a valuable struggle to see into deeply.
In Csiki’s introduction, he writes,
“I am familiar with day-to-day terror and the saving power of loyalty and solidarity, I am familiar with poverty and the canny techniques of survival of the oppressed; have learned, besides Hungarian, the universal human language.”
9. Long Walk to Freedom, by Nelson Mandela
I listened to this on audiobook while driving around Poland volunteering, when the Ukraine war started.
Of course, this incredible man’s story was inspiring beyond belief, to hear in detail all the things he went though. Not only was in prison for 27 years, but he even sacrificed his first marriage for the cause.
His whole life was in service to being a freedom fighter.
But he also describes in detail his philosophy, ideals, and morals behind the movement to overthrow the oppressive government.
He talks about the leaders’ specific strategies and methods they used, and how they adapted them based on how they played out in reality.
Fighting for freedom is no joke.
It’s not something to just post on Instagram about from time to time. (Although that can be powerful.)
It’s something to dedicate our lives to.
I am constantly asking myself, how can the work I do be a tool for me to fight for freedom?
- Freedom for women from the patriarchy,
- Freedom for people of color from the racist oppressive world we live in,
- Freedom for people in less priveleged countries than the US to make a decent living in the countries where they live.
I strongly believe that change starts from within.
I also believe in the power of ethical marketing, because it allows typically underrepresented people to come out and speak boldly about the services they can contribute to the world.
10. Leveraging the Universe: 7 Steps to Engaging Life’s Magic, by Mike Dooley
This has been recommended to me by several of my mentors and I finally got the chance to read it. I’ve been working with and studying manifestation for quite some time now, so I can’t say that it had any brand new concepts for me, but I was definitely inspired by it.
I like his method for visualizing the things you want in life.
I also needed the reminder that it’s our job to visualize what we want to manifest.
To “dream it up,” as my client Lenka Lutonska says.
And to stop worrying about how it’s going to happen.
Because it’s simply a law of the universe that what we desire will come to us.
11. The Hermetica: The Lost Wisdom of the Pharoahs, by Peter Gandy and Timothy Freke
I’d categorize this as esoteric philosophy in poetry form. Hermes was considered a “sage-god” in Ancient Egypt, and the teachings influenced many Greek philosophers down the road, as well as many of the artists during the Renaissance period.
These guys put the complex writings into bite-sized format. One of my favorite topics is the concept of TIME and how we as humans perceive it.
I believe our current modern view of time is extremely unhelpful and causes a lot of anxiety. I often play with different ways of looking at it in my own life and business, through different lenses of time – rather than as a linear journey.
In this book, they describe time as the way we experience change.
- The season for rain,
- The season for gestation,
- The season for root-growing,
- The season for blossoming,
- The season for withering, dying, and regeneration.
It’s all a cycle that happens, each moment in its perfect season. Rather than a linear “competition.”
This can be infinitely helpful when it comes to business:
Thanks to a lot of unhelpful trends in online marketing, it feels like we need to achieve enormous levels of success in practically no time at all.
We need instant results.
If we pay x amount of money, we’ll get those instant results.
If that doesn’t work out, there’s something wrong with us.
We need to pay more…
And on and on.
When in fact, we each have our own unique seasons of change, when it comes to creating and building our bodies of work.
If we can look at it as a natural cycle written by the cosmos, we’ll make investments from a more empowering place.
If we can market from that place of empowerment, rather than pressuring people to fit into a man-made timeline, the work we do with our clients will be much more fulfilling.
I teach my own methods for this way of marketing in my program, Deep Marketing. If it resonates with you, you might be a good addition to our group.
Note:
I’ve included links to all these books throughout the post – none of them are affiliate links. I like to promote independent bookstores rather than ordering from Amazon. I’ve found bookshop.org to be a great resource, because they help you find local bookstores, and they donate their profits to a sharing pool between all the stores they represent.
Living in Serbia, I haven’t found any independent bookstore that will deliver books like these, so I order off Book Depository and buy from used bookstores while I travel. If you know of any site that might deliver to Serbia and isn’t owned by Amazon, I’d appreciate the tip!
As you can see, I love talking reading material any day of the week, so if you’ve read these books and want to discuss, or have recommendations you think I’d enjoy reading, I’d love to chat with you on Instagram about it. 💙
