Who

Devi Brown is a renowned well-being educator, meditation teacher, healer, author, and host of the Deeply Well podcast.

What

Living in Wisdom is a guide to cultivating a stable inner peace even amidst chaos. Brown’s 8-step approach to healing is designed to build bridges of connection in mind and body.

& We

…chose Living in Wisdom because it is a practical guide to getting “unstuck” and doing the actual work of healing. Enjoy!

Here’s Your Exclusive Excerpt

So how do we heal? How do we get to that place of higher awareness and purpose? If you are like most of the people I have worked with through their suffering, you are wrestling with those questions right now. You, like them, are educated about the tools that exist out there. You, like them, have most likely tried “doing the work.” You, like them, could give me all the terminology about your suffering and can tell me where and why it hurts. And yet, as I hear again and again, “I’m still suffering.” 

And so it’s time to heal.

The way you’re going to do that is by following the process I shaped after my own path to healing. It involves eight crucial steps, each reverse engineered from the wound to the wisdom, from the pain to the medicine. These steps are designed to be layered, to help you build bridges of connection in mind and body, and to follow the flow of what I believe a full, complete healing journey looks like. They are:

1. Grieve
2. Release and Find Intention
3. Retreat
4. Heal and Accept
5. Self- Care and Devotion
6. Set Boundaries, Live in Choice
7. Experience Joy
8. Self-Love as Divine Love

But as you also most likely know by now, these steps are not a checklist. This is not a weekend of vision boarding or a New Year’s resolution. There is no medal for completion. Rather, each of these steps is part of a deeper lifelong process that is designed to help you fully embody this knowledge. For that reason, each of these steps could take you years to work through— and that’s okay.

The Keys to Healing

While you are moving through these eight steps, you are actually undergoing a bigger, more significant transformation. The slow movement through and repetition of the rituals I will ask you to be doing every single day in conjunction with them builds a practice. It is a practice that requires devotion, and it is through devotion that you build mastery—mastery of creation, mastery of intention, and mastery of wisdom— in order to arrive at purpose.

These are the keys to healing.

These principles are what are actively reshaping neural pathways in your brain, literally reprogramming you from the inside out. They are how you will be able to climb out from under ruminating thoughts, endless negative feedback loops, old damaging patterns, and feeling stuck. They are the motor behind your ascension from awareness to acceptance. They are the secret ingredients that make the healing process work, and they are ultimately what life is all about.

BECOMING AN ARCHAEOLOGIST OF THE SOUL

I want you to think of the work that lies ahead for you as a deep excavation. In order to move through the necessary stages of healing, you’re going to have to do some unearthing and a thorough examination of all the pieces.

This may be deeply uncomfortable if not angering or even repellent work. Some of you may have experienced “big‑T” trauma— abuse, neglect, violence, generational suffering. Some of you may be navigating post- traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a mental health condition affecting those who have experienced traumatic events or circumstances that affected them mentally, physically, socially, or spiritually. Some of you may be coping with complex post- traumatic stress disorder (CPTSD), which can develop after experiencing long- term or repeated trauma. But even if that is not clinically what you identify with, many if not most of us have had what I call Complex Lived Experience, meaning that there may not be one central event you can trace back to as the source of your pain. For many, myself included, it’s a cumulative effect, the layering over time of loss, lack of support, physical pain, emotional betrayal, and on and on and on. And as a result, the events in our lives that may seem like they could be the straightforward and central pain point— a divorce, a car accident, a violation of trust— are instead entangled within the context of every single other layer of pain we’ve experienced, whether that’s within our family, our community, our society, or our epigenetic timeline. All this is to say, trauma, as it is clinically defined, does not need to be present in order for healing to be required— and complicated.

Also, because of that pain, you will have what I have come to understand both through my own work and Divine revelation as “barriers to healing.” When confronted with the necessary exercises required of you to heal, you may want to shut it down— not owing to any personal shortcomings or deficits, but rather as a result of your built‑in self- preservation mechanisms. It is easier to put up the wall. It is safer to leave things as they are. It is more comfortable to preserve the status quo.

When I first started working with students to help them navigate their own healing, I thought it was my job to contort myself as their teacher to help them overcome these barriers; I thought I had to be all the things to everyone in order to help them make their way out the other side. I quickly learned that I was not meant to show them— or you— how to dissolve those barriers. I am only meant to show people how to investigate the againstness they have to something. Acknowledging these barriers, understanding where they come from, and honoring them as more information about yourself and what you require is just one more torch illuminating the path that lies ahead to the depths.

Excerpted from Living in Wisdom by Devi Brown. Copyright © 2025 by Devi Brown. Reprinted with permission of Balance Publishing, an imprint of Hachette Book Group. All rights reserved.