The Stirring: Excavating Your Authentic Self for the Life that is Waiting

You already feel it.A quiet restlessness beneath a life that is, by most measures, full. Something has been stirring — patient, persistent, waiting for you to finally stop long enough to listen. This book is your answer to that stirring.What if the life you have been waiting for has been waiting for you?In The Stirring, Susan Sterkenberg — coach, grief researcher, and author of Becoming Sanctuary and What Remains — invites you into nine transformative excavations through the most universal territories of a human life:Truth — what you have known but not yet trustedVoice — the inner authority you have been talking yourself out ofVulnerability — what becomes possible when the performance falls awayPresence — the life that is only available right here, right nowConnection — what it costs and what it gives to truly enter another person's worldLoss — what grief excavates that nothing else canTransformation — who you are becoming in the middle of not yet knowingDesire — what you genuinely want, beneath everything you were taught to wantEssence — the person who has been here all alongThis is not a program. It is an excavation: patient, curious, unhurried. The way a pearl is made — from the inside out.Part memoir, part guided excavation, part coaching companion, The Stirring weaves Susan's own story — including the loss of her son Greg, the arc of thirty years in coaching rooms and leadership, and the life she finally stepped into on the water — with deep reflection questions, body-based practices, and seasonal wisdom that invite you to do the same excavation in your own life.Each chapter includes a Tending the Whole Self section with body, mind, and spirit practices; an Emerging Life Collage that accumulates across the book into a portrait of your essential self; and reflection questions that go where most books are afraid to go.What emerges is not a life you engineered. It is the life that was always waiting for you to arrive in it."The pearl is not made by force. It is formed, layer by layer, in the quiet dark — from exactly what the oyster already holds. So is the authentic self. So is the life that is waiting."Readers of these books also love The Stirring:Wintering by Katherine May • Transitions by William Bridges • Let Your Life Speak by Parker Palmer • The Gifts of Imperfection by Brené BrownAbout the AuthorSusan Sterkenberg, PhD, holds a Doctorate of Psychology in Grief Counseling and has spent thirty years as a career and life transitions coach, organizational development practitioner, and leadership developer. Her doctoral research proposed a hope-developmental framework for grief transformation — a model she built as a researcher and lived as a mother, after losing her son Greg to an overdose in 2015 at twenty-three years old.She is also the author of Becoming Sanctuary; What Remains: Music, Memory, and the Miracle of Barbara; and Wavelengths of Wisdom: The John Jaminet Legacy Story. She lives with her husband John on Hilton Head Island, South Carolina. Read more