<h2 style=”text-align: center;”>Healing demands courage, not perfection. This is my face-to-face story with illness, addiction, and survival. No fluff. Just the grit, the dark nights, and the unexpected beauty of coming back alive.</h2>
<img align=center,style=”max-width: 100%; height: auto; margin: 20px 0;” src=”https://stevepatterson.online/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Screenshot-2025-09-23-155211.png” alt=”This Is How It Feels to Heal cover” align=”right” />
<strong>About the Book</strong>
<em>This Is How It Feels to Heal</em> was never marketed when it first appeared, but it carries the weight of lived truth that deserves to stand beside my other published works. It is both memoir and meditation, a chronicle of what happens when life strips you down to bone and forces you to rebuild.
The book moves through three intertwined layers of experience:
<ul>
<li><strong>The Body</strong> — surviving liver cancer and a transplant, learning to live inside new limits while refusing to be defined by them.</li>
<li><strong>The Mind</strong> — navigating addiction, relapse, recovery, and the psychological wreckage left behind.</li>
<li><strong>The Spirit</strong> — drawing on shamanic practice, narrative integration, and moments of transcendence that turned pain into meaning.</li>
</ul>
It’s raw testimony. I wrote it without a marketing plan, without institutional approval, and without smoothing the edges. That’s what makes it different. This isn’t a “feel-good” recovery story or a clinical case study. It’s a lived manual of survival written by someone who walked through fire and came back with scars intact.
<strong>What Readers Will Find Inside:</strong>
<ul>
<li>The visceral truth of what it means to face death and claw your way back to life.</li>
<li>Moments of despair and renewal, written without filter.</li>
<li>Reflections that cross the boundaries of science, consciousness, and spirituality.</li>
<li>A map for healing that does not separate mind, body, and soul but weaves them into a whole.</li>
</ul>
<p><em>This Is How It Feels to Heal</em> is not just a personal chronicle—it is also a mirror. Readers see in its pages the way trauma, illness, and addiction test the human spirit, but also how those same forces can break open hidden strength. The story insists that healing is not the erasure of scars, but the re‑weaving of life around them.</p>
<p>Drawing on shamanic traditions and altered states, I describe moments that science now recognizes as catalysts for neuroplasticity and profound identity shifts. Whether through delirium brought by liver failure or the intentional surrender of shamanic trance, I show how consciousness itself can bend, fracture, and re‑form into something new. These aren’t abstractions—they are lived realities that carried me from the brink of death to the work I now share with others.</p>
<p>The book also serves as a foundation for my later works—the Companion, the Facilitator’s Guide, and the ASAM edition. Those books provide tools for others; this one shows where those tools were forged. For counselors, healers, and people in recovery, <em>This Is How It Feels to Heal</em> offers not a blueprint, but a lived map—proof that survival is possible when body, mind, and spirit are brought back into conversation with one another.</p>
<p>Readers who arrive expecting inspiration will find something more unsettling but ultimately more valuable: truth without polish. The pages are haunted by nights of confusion, moments of surrender, and the raw honesty of a man who had to let go of everything to discover what remained. That is why this book continues to matter—not as a product, but as a testament to the unvarnished process of coming back alive.</p>
<strong>Available Now:</strong><br>
<strong><a href=”https://www.amazon.com/This-How-Feels-Heal-challenges/dp/B09QP24XJG” target=”_blank” rel=”noopener”>Buy <em>This Is How It Feels to Heal</em> on Amazon</a></strong><br>
Publication: January 20, 2022<br>
ISBN-13: 979-8405651613