BOOKMARKED
MANIFESTING USING STILLNESS, NOT STRIVING
BY ROCHELLE BOURGAULT
Yoshuku The Japanese Art of Manifesting
By Azumi Uchitani HarperOne, 2025
The heart of yoshuku is appreciating what we have, being at one with nature, and finding fulfillment from being alive. Life’s value comes from nature’s gifts. Attuning to this energy raises our vibration, cultivates resilience, and strengthens bonds. This is where the magic happens.
Azumi Uchitani’s Shinto-Buddhist practices are interconnected and cyclical, devoted to presence. No manifesting six-figure paychecks, though quieting the mind and falling in love with your life may reward you handsomely.
Yoshuku (the practice) does not distinguish between past, present, and future. You are already the future, a cherry tree overwintering. Uchitani writes, “Manifestation, or nurturing a wish, is like encouraging a tree to blossom. Just as a flower requires the right conditions, care and patience … so too does a wish need attention, self-belief, and perseverance.”
This book is packed with austere, reverent practices for creating stillness and space to keep our life-force raised. Yoshuku is a welcome counterpoint to capitalistic mindset work that relies on growth, achievement, and material abundance for success. A gorgeous, delightful antidote for achievement fatigue.
On Mindful Democracy: A Declaration of Interdependence to Mend a Fractured World
By Jeremy David Engels Parallax Press, 2026
The world will not be saved through virulent memes and polarization but by a groundswell of small, collective gestures. Jeremy David Engels’ work feels exciting; he is a professor of communication whose work focuses on reimagining democracy. With deep emotional intelligence, Engels probes “what democracy once aspired to be and the farce ‘democracy’ has become.”
Activism, advocacy, speaking truth, and using your voice to uplift and serve others: The precepts of Buddhism overlay neatly with the tenets of a high-functioning democracy. This book’s original rallying cry—a new Declaration of Interdependence—has done more for this world-weary mind and heart than any partisan diatribe ever could.
Like meditation, he writes that “democracy is a practice—it is something that we do together, in community, with our friends, neighbors, colleagues, strangers, and yes, even supposed ‘foes.’” Read this book aloud at a town green, at a school board meeting, at yoga teacher training, at a TED Talk. Offer Engels’ teachings in meditation or study groups, quietly galvanizing others. This is a moment, a shift in collective action from engaged individuals. What more perfect corollary could there be to a mindfulness practice?
What’s True About You: 7 Steps to Move Beyond Your Painful Past and Manifest Your Brightest Future
By Katherine Woodward Thomas Penguin Life, 2026
Thomas is the thought leader and writer who coined the term “conscious uncoupling.” What cultural moment lay coiled within this book, ready to change the conversation? Here, we are asked to “consciously redefine” our lives so we are creators of the future and not victims of the past.
Blame is a source of stalemate. “You are actually the source of all the evidence you’ve gathered through the years,” Thomas writes, gearing us up to center ourselves in a new story. Past is past—with exceptions for the deepest “shrapnel” of trauma. By probing our familiar, wounded scripts, we can reframe, repattern, and reclaim our healing.
Caution: If it catches fire, this book could tank the self-help industry. This book is for you, the author counsels, “if you find yourself frustrated by the years you’ve spent digging around in your past with nothing significantly changing.” There are some predictable and empty-ish incantations, but mostly there is a thrill of potential in What’s True; a perpetual May, all growth ready to burst forth.
Art Cure: The Science of How the Arts Save Lives
By Daisy Fancourt Celadon Books, 2026
Daisy Fancourt, a researcher and professor of psychobiology and epidemiology, believes that the arts—every last click-click of knitting needles or contralto karaoke riff—are good for you. Not just good but transformative: stress-busting, immune-boosting, and cardio-fortifying.
Think beyond museums and theater: Singing delivers a dopamine rush, a cascade of physiological benefits that streaming some algorithm-generated playlist through earbuds never will. “Art helps us not only to survive but to thrive and flourish,” Fancourt writes. “In fact, it’s not an exaggeration to say the arts could save your life.”
Art Cure is lighthearted yet packed with convincing research and data. The author laments that art has become so commodified that people perceive it as a luxury rather than essential, so she emphasizes the power of “microdosing” creativity. Cognitive leisure activities (crafts, puzzles, volunteering) are included. Arts can be “a legal performance-enhancing drug,” a claim her research supports.
Fancourt’s work is paradigm shifting. She rallies us to implement her vision for a “different society—one that values and supports the arts and artists.” The arts are already abundant (if underfunded). We do not need to build a new world. We need to better engage with the one we are privileged to already live in. &
ROCHELLE BOURGAULT is a writer, editor, and book coach specializing in wellness and spirituality. She loves nature, building community, ashtanga yoga, and parenting her young children. Visit rochellebourgault.com.
