Strong like Water: Finding the Freedom, Safety, and Compassion to Move through Hard Things--and Experience True Flourishing
Ebook
There's a cost to being a certain kind of strong.
When it comes to difficult circumstances, we’ve all heard the platitudes: “No pain, no gain.” “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” But if we spend our lives trying to be “the strong one,” we become exhausted, burned-out, and disconnected from our truest selves.
What if it were different? Could there be a different way to be strong? Could strength mean more than pushing on and pushing through pain, bearing every heavy burden on our own? What if, instead, true strength were more like the tide: soft and bold, fierce and gentle, moving together as one powerful force?
In Strong like Water, author and trauma therapist Aundi Kolber offers a framework for true flourishing. With each page, you’ll:
- Learn how your nervous system shapes your experience so that we can move through pain instead of being stuck in it.
- Explore various practices, rhythms, and resources to support you in challenging circumstances with compassion and hope.
- Discover how to internalize connection, love, and safety—empowering you with greater resilience.
A different, more expansive way of healing, wholeness, and possibly—especially—strength is possible. We were made to be strong like water.
In Strong like Water, Aundi Kolber emerges as one of the most trusted and approachable voices at the intersection of faith, trauma, and body-centered therapy. The practices alone are worth reading this excellent, well-researched, heartfelt book.
Strong like Water is a beautiful gift for anyone who has felt like they have to stay strong to survive. With wisdom drawn from her own story and her clinical expertise, Aundi Kolber reimagines strength as a dance of tenacity and tenderness, of holding tight and of learning to release. This brave and insightful journey through resilience is a revelation—one that honors both the grit it takes to survive and the compassion it takes to heal.
The process of navigating hard things is not a linear path for any of us, but with clarity, resources, research, and the deepest wells of compassion, Aundi lends her heart and expertise as she guides us through this road map of healing and discovery in her latest offering. Strong like Water contains truths that ultimately lead us back to ourselves and the ever-present reminder that God has and always will be with us on our journey of becoming more beautifully human in the midst of adversity. This is a book I need now and will surely return to as often as necessary.
I’ve never had such a personally moving, healing, and formative experience while reading a book. Aundi offers wisdom on every page as well as practices for your mind, heart, body, and soul that will help guide you through pain and that embody what true flourishing and resilience are all about.
I was deeply moved reading Strong like Water and felt comfort and confidence from Aundi’s practical, compassionate words. The work of healing and integration often feels heavy, like it’s easier left undone, but Strong like Water adds direction, lightness, and hope to a worthwhile journey.
Strong like Water is a trustworthy guide away from fear and into the safe embrace of love, where healing resides. I will carry Aundi’s words into the corners of my everyday life—as a neighbor, parent, spouse, and friend. This book is for the hurting, the rattled, the stuck, the numb; which is to say, it’s for each one of us. All is not lost. The gentle way of hope awaits.
In a culture full of conflicting messages about the value of strength, where to find it, and how to use it, Strong like Water is both an anchor and a lighthouse. Aundi’s book is full of gentle, resourceful tools and generously offered stories. What a gift this book is for all the weary souls who aren’t sure if they have what it takes or what they need, or are afraid of what they might find within themselves.
With careful thought and gentle intention, Aundi is a trusted guide who distills what she’s learned as a trauma-informed therapist. If you’re feeling like you’re holding the weight of the world, this book will speak to your soul, offer needed resources, and invite you into the sacred work of healing.
Aundi shows a way beyond “toughing it out” and “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” and it’s a gentle and self-compassionate approach. Ultimately, it’s the way of Jesus, and Aundi is a wonderful guide into it.
Strong like Water beautifully acknowledges the courage that survival requires and offers practical tools to move from simply coping to gaining embodied strength. Over your own deep waters, Kolber’s voice will rise as a wise and gentle guide, calling forth your inner strength and testifying to God’s redeeming love.
Strong like Water is such a timely book as so many of us deal with the pressure of needing to be the “strong one” in one way or another. This book is an encouraging guide that will help you gracefully navigate the many experiences of life that call for strength.
In this inspiring entry, counselor Kolber (Try Softer) encourages readers to redefine their notions of emotional strength. At 22, Kolber writes, she was standing in the crashing waves of the Pacific, distraught after breaking off an engagement and quitting her first postcollege job, when a sudden awareness of God’s love helped her find peace. Inspired to forgo rigid notions of strength, she decided to become “strong like water”—a concept that was “rooted in a foundation of love,” and allowed her to be both “soft and bold.” Kolber aims to help readers achieve such a strength through improved self-knowledge and “compassionate” emotional resources. To that end, she explains situational strength, which can “outwardly appear to carry you through stressful situations,” but creates long-term anxiety, and “transitional strength,” which promotes healing through “repatterning” trauma responses. She provides an explainer on how the nervous system processes stress, showing that shifting from “fight-flight-fawn” mode to a “window of tolerance” state enables mental flexibility. Finally, she recommends cultivating “compassionate resources” such as inner trust (finding a “soft landing place” in oneself) and emotional flexibility. Kolber offers a healing approach that’s compassionate and personal, yet still grounded in practical psychology. Many self-help readers will find value here.
- Title: Strong like Water: Finding the Freedom, Safety, and Compassion to Move through Hard Things--and Experience True Flourishing
- Author: Aundi Kolber
- Publisher: Tyndale Refresh
- Print Publication Date: 2023
- Logos Release Date: 2022
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9781496454737, 9781496454713, 1496454715, 1496454731
- Resource ID: LLS:9781496454737
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2024-03-12T09:06:34Z