Books by Stephanie Mines, PhD

- Shares the author's journey of learning the healing art of Jin Shin, discovering the embryological roots of resilience, and healing her own trauma 

- Explores how the Jin Shin sites correlate with the Chinese Extraordinary Meridians and with specific embryological events 

- Shows how subtle touch in combination with trauma resolution amplifies neuroresilience, enhances creativity, restores motivation, and heals the fragmentation and disconnection associated with trauma and shock 

When neuroscientist Stephanie Mines started practicing the hands-on healing art of Jin Shin, she began to unravel the mystery of trauma and the secret to resilience. 

As a survivor of early childhood abuse, police brutality as a social justice activist, and a series of dysfunctional and abusive relationships, Mines was profoundly curious about how the human nervous system finds resilience despite the cumulative burden of chronic stress and traumatic life events. While earning her doctorate in neuropsychology, she met Mary Iino Burmeister, master of the art of Jin Shin, through one of Mary's first American students, Pamela Markarian Smith, founder of the Jin Shin Institute. Jin Shin consists of non-invasive touch, using the fingertips, on sites of the body that are similar to acupuncture points. 

After Jin Shin helped Mines resolve her own trauma and awaken her innate resilience, she began to incorporate it into her clinical research. She discovered that the Jin Shin sites correlate with the Chinese Extraordinary Meridians or Rivers of Splendor, which develop prenatally. She then began investigating our earliest neuro-developmental processes and was able to correlate the Jin Shin sites with specific embryological events. She found that subtle touch on these sites in combination with trauma resolution amplifies neuroresilience, enhances creativity, restores motivation, and heals the fragmentation and disconnection associated with trauma and shock. 

Sharing her personal journey as a wounded healer, Mines reveals not only how to unlock the secrets of resilience for individual healing but also how embodied resilience will help us heal our wounded planet.

ENDORSEMENTS

"A precious gift of the heart. Mines understands both the tragedy of trauma and the opportunity it creates for us to regain agency and remember who we are. She offers a blueprint that we can use to access primal energies at the source of our authenticity. When we access this flow of energy, we become more aware of the habituated patterns of survival that are no longer serving us. If we can see or feel these patterns, then we have choice. When we have choice, we are empowered. When we are empowered, we can be more fully who we are. If we can do this, we are no longer just surviving, we are thriving. This is how the world is saved." ― ―Yvonne R. Farrell, DAOM, L.Ac., author of Psycho-Emotional Pain and the Eight Extraordinary V

"It is time to remember your sacred wholeness as a human being— drawing on your innate wisdom for resilience and well-being. Through intimate stories and sacred principles, you will understand that you are a vital part of the Hoop of Life. If you wish to be more resilient and to be the ambassador of your well-being then read The Secret of Resilience." ― Anita Sanchez, Ph.D., author of The Four Sacred Gifts

"This is a book for the times in which we live. The Secret of Resilience will surprise you with its simplicity, accessibility, humanity, and beauty. Stephanie presents us with a path forward that feels both possible and necessary. This is a must-read for those who are awake to what is ahead for us." ― Clare Dubois, founder of TreeSisters

"Stephanie Mines's numinous and lyrical memoir gorgeously embodies healing in Interbeing. Its profound truths shift our understanding of what it means to be human, especially as we relate to birth, Gaia, and cosmos. It will unwind the fields of trauma, bodywork, acupuncture, embryology, and all of medicine." ― Stella Osorojos Eisenstein, DAOM, IMT

"It is hard work weaving poetry into the gritty work of healing trauma, but Mines has managed to produce a book that is both medicinal and mystical." ― Sophie Strand, author of The Flowering Wand and The Madonna Secret

"The Secret of Resilience brings decades of academic and personal insight into focus from an embryological and neurodevelopmental standpoint. As Mines states, we have a birthright of resilience. This book is sure to be of enormous help to many people wading out of the muck of trauma into this inheritance." ― Trista Hendren, publisher of Girl God Books

"This book is an 'allegiance to the earth' and an invitation to reunite with our birthright." ― Cheryl Pallant, Ph.D., author of Ecosomatics

"This book appears at the precise time that it is needed for planetary evolution. Mines has dedicated her life to a brilliant exploration of embryology. In that exploration, she has found the secret to resilience that is the key to meeting these chaotic and heartbreaking times. Her personal and professional message directs us to the rediscovery of our innate brilliance. This is a must-read for anyone who inhabits a body and is curious about why they are here now." ― Dr. Clare Willocks, OB-GYN, founder of Bridging the Healthcare Gap

"It is so rare and precious to find a teacher who prefers not to tell you things, so much as sing you into a new realm of knowledge and vision. Stephanie Mines is a dancer: she dances from the most touchingly and disarmingly personal to the grandest visions for humanity's potential future. She calls us fearlessly to a homecoming, a necessary return to our ecstatic inner core: our limitless source of vitality and renewal. I've learned so much from this tender and compassionate book. It's exactly the book humanity needs today." ― Robin Grille, psychologist and author of Parenting for a Peaceful World and Inner Child Journeys

“Each person can learn to recognize and resolve their shock experience, sometimes alone, other times with help. Mines’ goal is to empower the reader to clear out the conditioning that decreases our freedom to live with buoyancy.”
—Psychology Today

Have you tried to “snap out of it” but just can’t seem to? We Are All in Shock shows how you can move past traumas—grounded in psychology, energy medicine, and neurobiology—to reclaim your health and potential through energy healing.
 

“Dr. Stephanie Mines offers practical steps people can use to fortify and empower themselves and their loved ones …It is a book for our times."—Peter A. Levine, PhD, author, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma
 

We Are All in Shock provides the tools for reclaiming complete well-being after overwhelming experiences of shock, whether caused by the massive sweep of current events or a personal catastrophe. Dr. Mines redefines psychological trauma and revolutionizes the concept of self-care by identifying the true cause of anxiety, explaining why it is so prevalent in society today and how by recognizing its effect we can find new stability and healing.  Parents, nurses, crisis workers, massage therapists and body workers, psychotherapists and the everyday reader will benefit from the practices Dr. Mines designed not only for symptomatic relief but also for the complete resolution of physical, psychological, emotional and spiritual shock and trauma.
 

We Are All in Shock demystifies energy medicine by presenting the reader with tools to help diminish and eliminate the nervous system’s habitual responses to overwhelming events. Dr. Mines’ work combines skills from energy healing related to acupressure on the energy meridians of the body with the most contemporary scientific interpretation of how the brain works, to offer a clear understanding of neurological behavior.

The invitation I received from Lisa Reagan of Kindred Media to assemble a collection of my poems as a chronicle of these times stopped me in my tracks. It led me to an internal retrospective of my life in which I saw that I was born to be a poet as well as a healing artist. Though I had inhabited the world of the writer fully, whole-heartedly, and with great passion when I lived in San Francisco during the 1970’s and 1980’s, I nevertheless was drawn out of it. Forces I would never have predicted magnetized me into the realms of healing and healthcare and then to climate activism. These pulls seemed to be products of the times that I surely chose to inhabit. Or did they choose me? It is difficult to discern.

Making art is liberating and in the liberation, there is always joy. Yet my poems are drenched with grief. There is no escaping it. It is everywhere, and increasingly so as we seem bent on self-destruction, annihilating species, and violence against children. 

I should be accustomed to it. My life has been marked by irrevocable losses. This is underscored by the crushing impact of the Anthropocene. The loss that is the most brutal, the most devastating, is the loss of our children’s future. I am speaking of the children of the world, born and unborn, as well as my own children and grandchildren.

I speak as a woman who lost her childhood to abuse and violence. I am someone who experiences every day the absence of an anchoring, stable adult to mitigate the horror around her. Aside from the occasional presence of my grandfather who died before I reached adolescence, I was abandoned by the adults in my world. My father returned from war forever broken and my mother could not withstand nor offset his attacks. I cannot separate the abuse of the earth from the abuse and violence inflicted on me and that we increasingly inflict on children and youth. My own formative experiences of not being accompanied, not being honored and respected, not being seen or heard, feels like it bonds me to our living earth.

By failing to protect, regenerate, treasure and honor the natural world as our most precious gift and sanctuary, we have abandoned our children.

What is a poet to do in the face of this aberration? In the aching of my grief, I offer these articulations as a form of action from my heart. As someone who trained to be a therapist, I know that healing often happens through mirroring. If these poems are mirrors for your felt experience and are therefore healing, I will have fulfilled one aspect of my destiny. 

This is a book that speaks to educational professionals, parents, healthcare providers and a general readership about how sensory integration difficulties, including autism, interfere with learning. The book provides practical, hands-on applications that teachers, aides, parents, therapists and family members can use to help young people with these difficulties learn and engage socially. The book is based, in part, on the clinical studies the author has conducted as well as her experience. There are numerous case studies in the book. The manuscript has been reviewed in its entirety by experts in the field.New Frontiers in Sensory Integration focuses on providing support for children with autism and sensory needs though the resources contained here can be used effectively for all children. The causes behind what we call Sensory Processing Disorders remain unknown despite ongoing research. This is because causation is likely a mixed bag of genetic, epigenetic, environmental, neurodevelopmental and cultural factors. The important question that this book addresses is what we as parents, therapists, educators and care-providers can do about this growing epidemic in an empowered and sustainable way, no matter the causation.

In surveying the literature on war and its aftermath, including the literature on Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), there is virtually nothing about the families of veterans. These families are the scapegoats of war. Their story is timeless but the author believes the time has come to tell it. The RAND Corporation study initiated by the National Military Families Association reports that military families have more emotional distress and anxiety than the general population. 95% of these families feel that others (outside the military) are unaware of their dilemmas. They are correct. The needs of the families of our veterans are, for the most part, ignored. In particular, their children are not given the support they need to offset the toxic conditions of war that is brought home.The distress in the homes of veterans creates an epigenetic burden that is carried most heavily by children. Investigations into the mechanisms of the intergenerational transmission of trauma reveal that the children of veterans who have seen combat and who have returned from war with PTSD are more prone to violence; are at a higher risk for behavioral, academic and interpersonal problems; have difficulty maintaining friendships; are more likely to have sensory challenges or to be diagnosed with autism; are at higher risk for depression and have difficulty concentrating. Knowing all this, what do we provide to take this burden off the shoulders of children and families? Close to nothing. Three simple, initial steps can begin to shed light on this shadow: Education; Resources; and Family Centered Transition.This is a book devoted to these three steps. When the author discussed these steps with civilians they frequently respond, in all innocence, by saying: “Don’t we already have this?” These three steps are so common-sense, so obviously needed, that the assumption by people who have not investigated this issue is that it has already been taken care of by the powers that be. Surely “they” know this. But there is no “they.” We must be the “they” that voices this obvious need and advocates for its fulfillment. It is a tall order, but it must be done.