Trauma: an embodied flashback. How many years of my life have I been ready to fight at a moments notice, or to collapse, disengage, and disconnect? I’ve always had a hard time speaking my truth and owning my viewpoints around men who don’t yield space for me to speak. Fight or flight.

I looked into my father’s eyes, with nothing to do, nothing to say, just the spaciousness to be there. As we continued to mill (eye gaze), tears began to well up in his eyes, a sight I had witnessed only a handful of times in my life. My heart began to melt and tense up, simultaneously. I felt alive, with my family, like I had not felt since I was very young.

ART’s first full year of operations draws to a close, and what a year it’s been! We delivered over 25 courses and events on 4 continents to almost 800 people, established our nonprofit organization to bring our work to prisons and schools, trained a dozen new ART Course Leaders, presented at the world-renowned Summit Conference in LA, launched our popular monthly Masterclass Calls, and increased our staff to 8 amazing humans.

Owning your experience is one of those standalone AR skills that can single-handedly radically transform the quality and depth of your relationships, if used skillfully. Owning your experience can have you reclaim all the ways you assert your opinions, perspectives, and assumptions and project them onto the fabric of reality, and find the source of your experience within yourself rather than outside of yourself.

If you enjoyed the first part of our crowdsourced book list, take a look at the next 20 (plus a couple of bonus books that we just couldn’t leave off the list!). As many of us are constantly looking for book recommendations to inspire and empower us, we surveyed our friends, teachers and clients of diverse backgrounds and interests to share their recommendations. We hope this list of the most influential and life-changing books of all time will be a valuable resource for you, and seriously uplevel your summer reading!