Review of Sarah Peyton's "Your Resonant Self"

I’ve hesitated to write this review, because how can I sum up the positive qualities of a book that has profoundly changed my view of the world and of myself? I first read Your Resonant Self several months ago, and since then I have been working with the guided meditations almost every day. I desperately needed this book, and I feel so thankful that it came into the world at a time when my need for its wisdom had become painfully obvious to me.

The author, Sarah Peyton, strikes the perfect tone to teach the reader about the concept of resonance and self-warmth. She is warm, loving, accepting, understanding, exactly the voice that she is teaching her readers to cultivate toward themselves. I feel like she is speaking directly to me, and hearing her approach me with respect is helping me learn to respect myself.

I’ve focused on studying a number of chapters from the book, with their accompanying meditations, but I’ll just highlight a couple of them here.

Peyton’s discussion of the effects of anxiety on the body coincided deeply with my own observations and experience. As I learned about the vagus nerve’s role in communicating anxiety from the body to the brain, I was able to recognize this connection physically happening in my body during moments of anxiety. Since anxiety has been one of my major life-long struggles, in my studies I have given special attention to Chapter 5, “Calming Anxiety: Moving Toward Trust,” and Chapter 8, “Vanquishing Ancient Fears.”

Chapter 5 highlights a meditation in which one “visits” his or her prenatal self to offer empathy to that past unborn child. The idea is that our patterns of anxiety may have begun in our mother’s womb, as we absorbed her emotional tone, and, when we join warmth with our image of our unborn self, we can begin to heal that formative experience. The first time I tried this meditation, I was struck by the joy and love that I felt in imagining my prenatal self. As I focused compassionate, supportive thoughts on this child, I had a realization. While I have spent many years longing for children, I actually have the opportunity right now to offer love, support, and warmth to a child who already exists: the one that I once was, a part of me that can still benefit from being seen and understood with warmth.

Chapter 8’s guided meditation, “Finding Your Safe Place,” gives the reader the opportunity to imagine an ideal setting, replete with everything that would make it “as beautiful, comfortable, and nourishing as you can imagine” (160). Peyton poses a series of questions that led me to create a mental retreat that I can “visit” at any time in order to access a sense of safety and nourishment. I found that it was easy to put such a setting together in my mind, drawing together elements of my favorite settings in books. It was noteworthy to discover that my image of an ideal place derived from books I loved in my childhood that I haven’t read in some time—The Magician’s Nephew, A Little Princess, and the lesser-known Behind the Attic Wall—instead of the books that I both read in childhood and have continued to re-read. That was an interesting look into how formative those books were in my life, even though I don’t think about them much now. I have always been intrigued with imagination, so I easily embraced the idea of using my imagination, drawing on images that I have loved, to create a safe place.

Your Resonant Self deals with a broad variety of mental and emotional health issues, in addition to anxiety: trauma, anger, self-hate, depression, addictions. It offers hope that our brains were created with the capacity to heal, even after decades of unhealthy patterns. The cultivation of that hope is why I am so thankful to Sarah Peyton for writing this book.