What It Takes To Heal

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.

Review

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

It’s 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.

-- BRENÉ 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

About the Author

Prentis is a therapist, somatics teacher and facilitator, political organizer, writer and the founder of The Embodiment Institute. For over 10 years, Prentis has been working with individuals and organizations during their most challenging moments of change; navigating leadership transitions, conflict, and realigning practice with values. All of this Prentis does through an embodied approach, ensuring that our intentions and ideas can be lived out and practiced in our lives and through our bodies.