A bold, soul-deep exploration of healing, consciousness, and inner truth.
Gilbert, a board-certified psychiatrist with decades of clinical experience, takes a psychospiritual look at the inner world of trauma, healing, and consciousness expansion in her debut book. Though trained in the rigors of Western psychiatry, she ventures into territory that traditional clinical frameworks rarely attempt to map, arguing—through lived experience rather than abstraction—that the psyche’s deepest wounds often contain their own medicine. She opens with the story of a spectral visitation in meditation, in which a long-lost neighbor child tells her, “It wasn’t your fault,” a moment that instantly signals the book’s blend of psychological inquiry and mystical encounter.
From there, she retraces years of Holotropic Breathwork sessions that operate much like case studies of consciousness, detailing visions in which shame becomes embodied, trauma speaks in symbolic language, and identity dissolves into what she calls “Divine Light.” Like a clinician documenting an unfamiliar phenomenon with precision and awe, Gilbert recounts these experiences not for sensational effect but to show how nonordinary states can reveal patterns that have shaped a lifetime. Readers watch as she interrogates buried memories, confronts childhood fragmentation, and revisits scenes of emotional rupture—always returning to the central question of what healing truly demands. When she describes the energetic residue of trauma as “trauma kinetics,” or the counterforce of awakening as “transcendent kinetics,” she does so not as rigid theory but as a framework that helps make sense of what the psyche is already expressing. Her encounters with the departed often arrive with a startling intimacy—like the moment Harold, speaking from within a ritual drum, reassures her, “They will never take my power,” collapsing the boundary between the human and the mythic.
Gilbert’s candor is one of the book’s greatest strengths. She refuses to sanitize the confusion, devastation, or awe that accompany deep inner work. Introspection and analysis blend smoothly throughout, keeping visionary experiences rooted in emotional truth. A guide’s calm assurance—“You will see me again, and I will teach you”—avoids melodrama and strengthens the book’s conversation between the seen and unseen parts of the self. Despite the depth of her subjects, her writing remains clear and inviting. Thoughtful, multilayered, and unflinchingly sincere, the book offers a lived blueprint for those wanting to understand the deeper patterns shaping their inner lives. Readers who loved When the Body Says No by Gabor Maté and Journey of Souls by Michael Newton will want to take a look.
Archangel Ink
Pub date August 5, 2025
ISBN 978-1950043637
Price $18.99 (USD) Paperback, $8.99 Kindle edition
