This year, I read more than seventy books ,fiction and non-fiction, and each one left something behind. Some offered language. Some softened me. Some unsettled me in ways that later felt essential. What follows isn’t a comprehensive list, but a shortlist of books that will stay with me forever. These are the ones that didn’t just inform me, but worked on me - shaping how I think, how I teach, and how I hold space.

For too long, menopause has been cast in the language of loss — a quiet decline, a soft unravelling into invisibility. But endings are never simply endings. They are compost, dark soil for something new to take root. What if menopause were not a diminishment, but an initiation? Not a failure of the body, but its deep wisdom at work — a fire that burns away the false so that we can meet what is true. Writers and teachers like Red School, Sharon Blackie, and Katherine May have

There are seasons when life feels tender at the edges — when everything within us is shifting, asking to be met in a new way. For many...