"When you are fierce, you don't compromise or let people push at the edges of what makes you who you are. You keep your feet firmly planted beneath you and you dig deep and find that determination, grit, and resolve that it takes to protect your heart, the way a mama bear guards her cubs, the way a tiger stalks her prey."

As parents, educators, and helping professionals, we need our strength now more than ever. Yet a lifetime of people-pleasing and putting others first has left many of us too exhausted and under-resourced to manage the task ahead of us. We have given ourselves away, and we are lost in a sea of unskillful coping, depression, anxiety, loneliness, and unacknowledged grief. The exercises and skills in this book will help you set the fierce boundaries you need to come home to yourself, curate your mental real estate for optimal health, transform traumatic stress, and interrupt cycles of addiction, fear, and abuse.

Cynthia Garner is a doctor of body-mind health, a somatic psychotherapist, a single mother who survived an emotionally abusive relationship through mental illness, and a former classroom teacher turned mindfulness instructor. In this book, she shares her life experience and expertise to provide a field-tested pathway for turning poison into medicine and reclaiming a sense of agency in these troubled times. She offers proven therapeutic practices for healing our relationship to ourselves, and a new narrative for those of us willing to try a different approach - believing that healing is possible and that we are worthy of carving out time and space for rest, joy, and wellbeing.