Curated Library
The Reading List
Books that have shaped my thinking, informed my practice, and kept me company on the path. Annotated with the notes of someone who reads with a pencil.
5 Books
Resilience & Transformation
Man's Search for Meaning
Viktor E. Frankl
The foundational text. Frankl's insight that we cannot avoid suffering, but we can choose how to cope with it and find meaning in it — this is the bedrock of everything I teach.
Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy
Sheryl Sandberg & Adam Grant
Sandberg's honest account of grief after her husband's sudden death, combined with Grant's research on resilience. Practical, humane, and unsentimental.
The Body Keeps the Score
Bessel van der Kolk
The landmark work on how trauma lives in the body. Essential reading for understanding why resilience is not just a mental exercise — it is embodied.
When Things Fall Apart
Pema Chödrön
Chödrön writes about groundlessness — the experience of having the rug pulled out — with a tenderness and precision that makes you feel less alone in the chrysalis.
Tiny Beautiful Things
Cheryl Strayed
Strayed's advice column, collected. The kind of honest, beautiful, unflinching compassion I aspire to in every coaching conversation.
5 Books
Pilgrimage & The Walk
The Pilgrimage
Paulo Coelho
Before The Alchemist, Coelho walked the Camino and wrote about it. Mystical, searching, and a beautiful entry point to understanding pilgrimage as spiritual practice.
Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
Cheryl Strayed
Not the Camino, but the same truth: sometimes you have to walk your grief until it transforms. Strayed's raw honesty about walking through loss is required reading.
A Philosopher Looks at the Religious Life
Zena Hitz
A meditation on the contemplative life and why stepping away from the noise — whether into a monastery or onto a trail — is not escape but encounter.
Wanderlust: A History of Walking
Rebecca Solnit
Solnit traces the history and philosophy of walking, from pilgrimages to protests. Walking as resistance, as meditation, as the fundamental human act of placing one foot in front of another.
The Art of Pilgrimage
Phil Cousineau
A beautiful guide to the inner dimensions of pilgrimage. Cousineau understands that every journey outward is also a journey inward.
4 Books
Death, Dying & What Matters
Being Mortal
Atul Gawande
Gawande writes about aging and dying with the clarity of a surgeon and the compassion of a storyteller. This book changed the conversation about end-of-life care in America.
When Breath Becomes Air
Paul Kalanithi
A neurosurgeon facing his own terminal diagnosis. Kalanithi's writing is so luminous that you forget, for whole passages, that he is dying. And then you remember, and it breaks you open.
The Five Invitations
Frank Ostaseski
Ostaseski co-founded the first Buddhist hospice in America. His five invitations — distilled from decades at the bedside — are the wisest guidance I know for living fully.
Advice for Future Corpses
Sallie Tisdale
Tisdale, a longtime hospice nurse, writes about death with a directness and dark humor that I deeply admire. No sentimentality, just truth.
4 Books
Women, Lives & The Full Range
Untamed
Glennon Doyle
Doyle's manifesto on trusting the voice inside you. The cheetah metaphor — stop performing, start living — resonates with every woman I coach who is ready to stop being "fine."
Women Who Run With the Wolves
Clarissa Pinkola Estés
The masterwork on the wild feminine psyche, told through myths and fairy tales. Estés is the grandmother I return to again and again.
Becoming
Michelle Obama
A memoir about transformation in public — the constant becoming that never stops. Obama's honesty about doubt, identity, and purpose is quietly radical.
The Second Sex
Simone de Beauvoir
The text that started the conversation. De Beauvoir's analysis of how women are made, not born, remains as relevant and provocative as ever.
3 Books
Gardens, Beauty & The Cultivated Life
Braiding Sweetgrass
Robin Wall Kimmerer
Kimmerer weaves indigenous wisdom and botanical science into a love letter to the living world. This book will change the way you see every garden, every forest, every plant on your windowsill.
The Garden as an Art
Mara Miller
A philosophical examination of gardens as works of art — spaces that are simultaneously cultivated and wild, designed and alive. The perfect metaphor for the life I help people build.
Onward and Upward in the Garden
Katharine S. White
White's New Yorker garden columns are elegant, opinionated, and deeply knowledgeable. She writes about seed catalogs the way I aspire to write about resilience — with precision, beauty, and passionate specificity.
“A library is not a luxury but one of the necessities of life.”
— Henry Ward Beecher