What It Takes To Heal: How Transforming Ourselves Can Change the World

(Paperback)

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*** Featuring a special UK introduction for all print and ebook editions ***

'A visionary, personal, compassionate, empowering guide BESSEL VAN DER KOLK

'Beautifully intimate and wildly expansive BREN BROWN

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What would it do to movements, to our society and culture, to have the principles of healing at the very center What does it mean to center healing in every structure and everything we create

As we emerge from the past few years of collective upheaval, are we ready to face the complexities of our time with joy, authenticity, and connection Now more than ever, we must learn to heal ourselves, connect with one another, and embody our values. In this revolutionary book, Prentis Hemphill shows us how.

What It Takes to Heal asserts that the principles of embodiment - the recognition of our body's sensations and habits, and the beliefs that inform them - are critical to lasting healing and transformation. Hemphill, an expert embodiment practitioner, therapist, and activist, who has partnered with Tarana Burke and Esther Perel, among others, shows us that we don't have to carry our emotional burdens alone. Hemphill demonstrates a future in which healing is done in community, weaving together stories from their own experience as a trauma survivor with clinical accounts and lessons learned from their time as a social movement architect.

In this life-affirming framework for the way forward, Hemphill shows us how to heal our bodies, minds and souls - to develop the interpersonal skills necessary to break down the doors of disconnection and take the necessary risks to reshape our world towards justice.

Reviews

I love this book. Hemphill offers us a visionary, personal, compassionate, empowering
guide for our healing as individuals, within the histories of our families, and deep within
the broader contexts of our communities, societies, and the world at large.

-- BESSEL VAN DER KOLK, author of The Body Keeps the Score

Its a rare thing for a book to be beautifully intimate and wildly expansive at the same
time, but that is precisely what What it Takes to Heal manages to be.

-- BREN BROWN

This book will be both the 'aha' moment and the balm for so many people who are
saddled with vacant platitudes that don't give them a way forward. It is what we need in
this moment and will be foundational for generations to come.

-- TARANA BURKE, author of Unbound

In a time when so many of us are being trained in cynicism, this book stands in
necessary defiance.

-- COLE ARTHUR RILEY, author of Black Liturgies and This Here Flesh

Hemphill teaches us where healing begins, and how crucial our healing is for the
worlds we want to conjure.

-- adrienne maree brown, author of Emergent Strategy and Pleasure Activism

A powerful, prescient, incisive book that helps us better understand ourselves, our
relationships, and how to fully be in this world, all while creating the next.

-- PRIYA PARKER, author of The Art of Gathering

This book reckons with our major issuestrauma, race, social upheavaland opens us
up to the possibility that everything actually could be different. And it does so one
gorgeous sentence after the next.

-- RESMAA MENAKEM, author of My Grandmothers Hands

In the tradition of James Baldwin, Hemphill invites us in close and personal to
experience life, pain, beauty, injustice and healing. Ill read this again and again.

-- STACI K. HAINES, author of The Politics of Trauma

Author Bio

Prentis Hemphill is a writer, embodiment facilitator, political organizer, and therapist. They are the founder and director of the Embodiment Institute and the Black Embodiment Initiative, and the host of the acclaimed podcast Finding Our Way. Their work and writing have appeared in The New York Times, HuffPost, You Are Your Best Thing (edited by Tarana Burke and Brene Brown), and Holding Change (by adrienne maree brown).