“One of the many things that I love about plants is their will and determination to live by any means necessary,” Brandi Sellerz-Jackson writes. “What if we all dared not only to reach for the sun but to take up space while doing so?”
In On Thriving: Harnessing Joy Through Life’s Great Labors, Sellerz-Jackson attracts inspiration from the plant world as she shares how she’s moved from current to thriving. As a start, postpartum and life doula, and as a blogger and founder of the Black-mom collective Moms of Color, she has coached others via their greatest challenges. On Thriving provides steering for flourishing in relationships and with one’s self.
Sellerz-Jackson has confronted devastating challenges of her personal from the time she was a hyper-vigilant little one whose intuition was to cover each sharp object in the home so her abusive father couldn’t do higher hurt to her mom or himself. So when she references a plant’s journey, she’s not making gentle of traumatic human experiences. Instead, she’s drawing an analogy between the interior work she’s accomplished and the vegetation that evokes her. On Thriving blends memoir and self-help, with Sellerz-Jackson excavating her personal experiences and prompting others to look at the methods they’re holding again.
Most chapters conclude with questions or journal prompts meant to information the reader again into dialog with themselves. Brief, poetic interludes present a pause within the midst of often-heavy reflection. Throughout, and particularly within the ebook’s closing part, Sellerz-Jackson examines methods being othered has affected her id and therapeutic. As a Black lady and a mom, she has wrestled with the expectation of being a “goddess”—which she says, “robs us Black women of our humanity and plays into the strong Black woman archetype.”
Some could have been othered in numerous methods, and she or he encourages them to look at how that have has affected the methods they transfer via the world. Sellerz-Jackson makes use of a conversational, direct tone and large empathy to information all readers to reside as the very best variations of themselves.
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