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
What if just by breathing, you could rewrite your family’s trauma story?
What if there were practical and accessible ways to reclaim yourself from toxicity and become the master of your mind?
What if healing your relationship with yourself allows you to be a refuge for others?
Fierce Boundaries is a guide for anyone ready to step out of survival mode and into a more intentional way of living.
The stories you’ll read and the skills you learn here will serve you in every part of your life—from how you show up in relationships to how you navigate work, parenting, and the more complex questions of our time.
Now is the time to reclaim your attention, restore your energy, and return to what matters most.
Use this link to order directly from Ingram if you prefer not to purchase on Amazon
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.
If you are tired of repeating the same toxic patterns you’re in the right place, you’re not alone, and it’s time to make a change.
It’s time to get fierce with your boundaries.
This isn’t your typical self-help book. I don’t sugarcoat the truth, and I have also done my best to offer a soft place to land. Setting boundaries is hard, but it is necessary if we are going to break the cycle. As a bonus side-effect, healthy boundaries are an act of kindness to others that ripples outward through your community and for generations.
In this book, you’ll learn:
How to recognize and break toxic cycles—whether in relationships or systems.
Practical tools to reclaim your attention and focus in a world designed to distract.
How to set boundaries that honor your needs without apology.
Techniques to transform grief, anger, and despair into purpose and connection.
This is about sustainability and an urgent need to reclaim mental real estate and become masters of our stories.
When you take back your power, when you protect your mental and emotional health with fierce determination, you don’t just heal yourself. You become a force for lasting generational change.
Available in digital, paperback, hardcover, and audiobook format.