Black Women Teach Us to Heal

Books by Black women to support your journey to healing and wholeness

Photo by Jessica Felicio on Unsplash

I’m wrapping up the Black Women Teach Us series with a focus on healing, because as Kelly Price sings:

I need a healing for my soul

So give me a healing for my soul

I need a healing for my soul

So give me a (Just for my soul I need healing)

Well, I need healing for more than my soul. I need healing for all of me, body, mind, and spirit. For over twenty years now, I have been on a self-care journey. This journey is not about losing weight or fitting society’s standard of what a woman should look like. It is about learning to love myself, learning to honor myself as one who is created in the image and likeness of God. It is about peeling back all the layers of crap that society imposes upon me, the layers that erode my self-concept, that teach me that work is more important than life, and that other people’s priorities should take precedent over my own needs.

My self-care journey began in November 2002. I had reached a point of physical and emotional crisis and, because I am a bookworm, I looked for a book that might help me to understand why I was suffering and what I needed to do differently. On my bookshelf I found Debrena Jackson Gandy’s Sacred Pampering Principles. It was in those pages that I saw the phrase, “Strong Black Woman” for the first time. Jackson’s book altered the trajectory of my life, introducing me to the use of affirmations and helping me to develop a starter set of holistic health practices that has only grown over the years. Once I began to see the StrongBlackWoman, I could not unsee it. It becomes a focus of my clinical and ministry work, eventually leading to the publication of my first book, Too Heavy a Yoke. My most recent book, Sacred Self-Care, shares the wisdom that I have gleaned and taught to others in my twenty-year self-care journey.

Even as a so-called self-care expert (I don’t know that anyone can ever become an expert), I need people to help me to stretch and strengthen my own practices. I especially appreciate the intersectional approach of Sonya Renee Taylor’s The Body Is Not an Apology, which helps us to understand how unjust systems make us become hostile to our own bodies and encourages us to love ourselves (which is really what self-care is all about). Tricia Hersey takes a similar approach in Rest Is Resistance and her newer, beautifully illustrated book, We Will Rest! Hersey helps us to see deep rest as a counter to harmful capitalist ideologies that teach us to value our lives based upon our productivity. A good, albeit perhaps unlikely, companion to Taylor and Hersey’s books is Rachel Rodgers’s We Should All Be Millionaires. I read this book over the summer at the recommendation of Candice Benbow (who was featured in the first installment in this series). It helped me realize how my antagonism toward capitalist greed has warped my relationship with money. Rodgers helps us challenge the scarcity mentality of capitalism while also advocating for a shift in hustle culture.

While physical self-care is hugely important, it’s usually emotional and spiritual issues that get in the way of good nutrition, exercise, sleep, and restfulness. A key issue is boundaries (or the lack thereof), which Nedra Glover Tawwab addresses in her book, Set Boundaries, Find Peace. Seriously, if you only ever read one book about boundaries in your life, this needs to be the one. It is informative and practical. I highly recommend Black Joy by Tracey Michae’l Lewis-Giggetts. Winner of an NAACP Image Award, this book helps us to pursue joy as a strategy for resistance and resilience. Joy Harden Bradford reminds us that we cannot be healthy alone in Sisterhood Heals. Since the presidential election, I’ve been leaning a lot more into the healing power of community with other Black women, so Bradford’s message is especially timely.

The self-care journey needs more than practices; it needs principles that can help us to find our way. bell hooks, Thema Bryant, and Cole Arthur Riley each provide these. It’s always hard to choose a single book by bell hooks on any topic, but I think I’ll go with All About Love because in order to practice love to ourselves and others, we need to know what love means. And frankly, our world is full of a lot of misinformation about the nature of love. In Homecoming, Bryant provides tools to help us to reconnect with our authentic selves and our communities in the aftermath of trauma and pain. And Riley’s Black Liturgies is a beautifully written book of prayers and poems that guide us toward a spirituality that we can trust in the midst of a world (and too often church) that we cannot.

Get these books. Buy them from a local bookseller in your own city or via Bookshop.org. Check the catalog of your public or university library to make sure that they carry them. If not, submit a purchase suggestion. Follow these writers on Substack and on social media. Read their work, put it into practice, and share what’s helpful with others.

What books by Black women have helped you to learn to love yourself, to heal from trauma and oppression, and to practice good self-care? Leave a comment and let us know.