Fierce Boundaries: Practical Skills and Somatic Exercises for Healing in a Traumatized World
In a world that feels fractured, with communities divided, systems collapsing, and families under strain, it is easy to feel overwhelmed. Yet the path to repair begins within. When you learn to regulate your own nervous system and care for your body, mind, and heart, you create the steady ground from which healing can ripple outward.
This book is an invitation to return home to yourself and to lead from that place of steadiness. Dr. Cynthia Garner, somatic psychotherapist, mindfulness teacher, leadership coach, author, and single mother, offers a field-tested pathway that integrates mindfulness, somatic awareness, and therapeutic practices. The work begins with cultivating presence and embodied boundaries, and extends into the way you care for your relationships, your community, and the systems you touch.
Fierce Boundaries is both a mindfulness-based pathway to relational healing and a leadership framework for collective healing in divisive times. Through practical tools and compassionate guidance, it shows how tending to your own wellbeing allows you to become a source of safety, clarity, and care for others.
Filled with real-world skills and therapeutic practices, Fierce Boundaries empowers readers to wake up, re-inhabit their bodies, and honor the grief in their hearts as they create a brighter future. Healing begins here, with you. You are the work. You are worthy of care. You are already enough.
Praise for Fierce Boundaries
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“Relatable, poignant, and brave, Garner’s collection of real-world skills for courageous healing is a must-read. This relatable book from a trauma survivor, educator, and therapist offers accessible practices for building boundaries, compassion, and presence.”
Elena Brower, bestselling author of Practice You and The Art of Attention
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A highly practical toolkit for putting the power of somatic techniques to work for you.”
Gay Hendricks, author of The Big Leap
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This book is one of the most compassionate and transformative guides I’ve ever read. The author’s personal stories feel deeply relatable, and the exercises are powerful in calming stress and healing old wounds. Since reading Fierce Boundaries, I’ve felt my nervous system settle in ways I didn’t think were possible.
-Elizabeth, Amazon Review
Cynthia Garner writes from lived experience. As a trauma survivor, divorced mother, educator, therapist and leadership coach, she knows the cost of generational abuse and the transformative power of mastering mental fitness, reclaiming your body, and healing your attachment wounds.
She shares raw, personal stories in Fierce Boundaries, illustrating how a mindfulness practice saved her from total emotional collapse and outbursts of rage while juggling a demanding teaching career, single motherhood, debilitating chronic pain, and relentless harassment.
By undertaking deep training in somatic psychotherapy and mindfulness-based interventions, Cynthia began to reclaim herself and to offer these practices within trauma-impacted communities as a pathway toward systemic healing. Writing this personal and practical book, and including these field tested practices as a pathway allowed her to finally draw the line, say “enough,” and stop the cycle for good.
The pathway she outlines—setting boundaries, reclaiming your mental real estate, moving from reactivity to intentional, compassionate action—is exactly what’s needed at a large scale in these divisive times.