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Neuroscientist, Embryologist, Poet
Cultivating the resilience necessary for the continuity of human civilization.
Neurobiology, Trauma Healing, Climate Change & Consciousness
Meet Stephanie Mines
Meet Stephanie Mines
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Her Story and Vision
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Pre-Order Your Copy of The Spirit of Malakai
The Spirit of Manaaki: Maata, a Living Library of Maori Wisdom and Medicine Practices
By Stephanie Mines, PhD
Release Date: December 9, 2025
Maori elder Maata Wharehoka’s teachings on birth, death, climate, and healing
• Reveals how Maata integrated her own experiences of trauma and colonialism with traditional Māori wisdom to develop modern teachings
• Shares Māori practices around birth, death, and healing, and Maata’s ritual of Kahu Whakatere to embrace bereavement, transition, and loss
• Tells the story of Parihaka, the birthplace of nonviolent protest, and how its teachings speak to humanity today
Entering the Māori worldview is like stepping into a verdant landscape where humans and plants, animals, the land, rain, and mountains are united. This may sound like a step into a distant past, but it is the model of living that matriarch Maata Wharehoka has been sustaining her entire life in Aotearoa, New Zealand.
The Māori word manaaki means to protect, to show respect, and to take care. This is the essence of Maata Wharehoka’s wisdom. Transmitting Maata’s wisdom to the world, Stephanie explores Maata’s pioneering efforts in healthcare, parenting, and social justice as well as her interpretations of traditional Māori teachings. The author reveals how Maata used her experiences of trauma and colonialism, along with generational Indigenous wisdom, to develop teachings for our times. Readers will learn Maata’s Māori practices around healing, death and dying, and relationship to elders as well as her views on the sanctity of birthing, parenting, kuiatanga (the way of the kuia, or women elders), inclusive healthcare, and the Earth. The author looks at Maata’s practice of Kahu Whakatere, a ritual to embrace bereavement, transition, and loss that reveals how death can be a peacemaker and unifier. Stephanie explores the Māori view of the climate crisis and how to address it with nature-informed consciousness.
With reflective exercises that share the hard-won wisdom of an elder, this book allows Maata’s spirit of manaaki—protection, respect, and care—to reach beyond Aotearoa to the world.
ENDORSEMENTS
"The courage and inspiration of the Māori people is unending. This book and its author inspire and remind us of our spiritual core and our mandate to do the righteous work."
Winona LaDuke, activist, and author of To Be a Water Protector, Last Standing Woman and The Winona LaDuke Chronicles
"In her biographical book, The Spirit of Manaaki, Stephanie Mines masterfully moving us through the Indigenous Worldview shift necessary to step onto "a bridge towards unity with all people." Once across the worldview bridge, we are introduced to Māori Elder Maata, "a Living Library of Māori Wisdom and Medicine Practices," who tells her life story in words and vibrant works of art, alongside her family members.
"As a healer and teacher herself, Stephanie is aware of her 'outsider looking in' role she plays in capturing, translating, and amplifying the healing insights of Maata's life. As a faithful guide and teacher, Stephanie provides engaging queries at the end of each chapter to help the reader integrate the worldview shifts and wisdom teachings. The result is the dynamic, deeply human experience of Maata herself and her fierce commitment to "forgive the unforgivable" as a path to love of self and others.
"The Spirit of Manaaki is a rare and welcome creation of integrative storytelling. Stephanie skillfully, humbly, and lovingly bridges our shattered Dominant Worldview with the relationally-aware and intact Indigenous Worldview of the Māori, while centering Maata's wisdom for finding belonging and forgiving the unforgivable as a path to love of self and others. As Stephanie promises us in The Spirit of Manaaki, this journey into the Māori world may sound like 'a step into a distant, or even a fantasy past, but it is actually a view of the future.'"
Lisa Reagan
Kindred World, Founder
Kindred Magazine, Editor
Discover The Great Physician
The Great Physician: Medicinal Poetry for the Anthropocene
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact Stephanie Mines, PhD, for Interviews
Kindred World Publishing House is proud to announce the release of The Great Physician: Medicinal Poetry for the Anthropocene, the first major collection of poetry by the renowned neuroscientist, healer, and climate activist, Stephanie Mines, PhD. In The Great Physician, Dr. Mines unflinchingly and soulfully moves us beyond transgenerational trauma, war, oppression, and planetary collapse, toward the truth of our birthright: our “Original Brilliance.”
In the recording of the Earth Day Poetry Reading below, you will find the timemarks here.
Beyond Traumatic Repetition: 5:25
The Black Madonna: 11:13
The Texture of Oppression: 17:38
1933: 34:54
About The Great Physician: Medicinal Poetry for the Anthropocene
In The Great Physician’s autobiographical poetry and prose, Dr. Mines shares how her personal and professional background shaped her insights into a fusion of trauma recovery and climate activism. In her global activism through her Climate Change & Consciousness nonprofit, Dr. Mines focuses on humanity's forward moving direction where inner and outer climates meet. In that place of mystery is our connection with the natural world and the living systems waiting to communicate with us, to give us what data cannot record.
Poetry, Dr. Mines says, helps make possible “the spaciousness needed to match our inner experience to the outer catastrophe that is accelerating before our eyes. It helps us to understand.” These poems are inner experiences through which she, and indirectly the reader, find a way to understand planetary experience, personal and generational cause and effect, and hopefully, the courage and energy to change organically—from war, intolerance, fear, ennui.
“The invitation I received from Lisa Reagan of Kindred World to assemble a collection of my poems as a chronicle of these times stopped me in my tracks. It led me to an internal retrospective of my life in which I saw that I was born to be a poet as well as a healing artist” writes Dr. Mines in the introduction to The Great Physician. “My life has been marked by irrevocable losses. This is underscored by the crushing impact of the Anthropocene. The loss that is the most brutal, the most devastating, is the loss of our children’s future. I am speaking of the children of the world, born and unborn, as well as my own children and grandchildren.”
In more than a dozen books that reflect her three decades of research as a neuroscientist and embryologist, Mines has investigated shock and trauma as a survivor, a professional, a clinical researcher, and a healthcare provider. Her work has resulted in her nonprofit, The TARA Approach, which provides practical means for the systemic change she promotes as a Regenerative Health paradigm. Her training and healing modality is used by individuals internationally and by professional counselors and organizations such as addiction clinics, abuse centers, and refugee charities.
As an acclaimed poet, Dr. Mines is the winner of the Joseph Henry Jackson Award for Poetry for her series The Nocturnes. She also received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts for developing poetry workshops in communities that resulted in several chapbooks of community poetry. She was also a founding member of the Poetry in the Schools Program and taught within it for almost a decade in California and Colorado.
In addition to The Great Physician: Medicinal Poetry for the Anthropocene, Dr. Mines’ books include the acclaimed works—The Secret of Resilience: Healing Personal and Planetary Trauma Through Morphogenesis, (2023) and We Are All in Shock: Energy Healing for Traumatic Times, (2020).
You can follow Stephanie’s work on her website at www.StephanieMines.com. You can also read her ongoing Crone Speak blog series on her Substack account at https://substack.com/@stephaniemines.
Product Details:
Paperback
7.5 x 9.25 inches
114 pages
ISBN: 978-1-7366517-1-1
Order The Great Physician directly from the publisher for discounted price of $17.98.
Order you copy of Stephanie Mine's first major collection of poetry, The Great Physician.
The Secret of Resilience
Healing Personal and Planetary Trauma Through Morphogenisis
"Stephanie’s work marks a tremendous turning point, a point of remembering and reuniting with the regenerative power of embryonic Original Brilliance.” – Dr. Spring Cheng, Indigenous Chinese Taoist and acupuncturist
Restore resilience at its developmental source through energy medicine
• Shares the author’s journey of learning the healing art of Jin Shin, discovering the embryological roots of resilience, and healing her own trauma
• Explores how the Jin Shin sites correlate with the Chinese Extraordinary Meridians and with specific embryological events
• Shows how subtle touch in combination with trauma resolution amplifies neuroresilience, enhances creativity, restores motivation, and heals the fragmentation and disconnection associated with trauma and shock
When neuroscientist Stephanie Mines started practicing the hands-on healing Art of Compassion, she began to unravel the mystery of trauma and the secret to resilience. As a survivor of early childhood abuse, police brutality as a social justice activist, and a series of dysfunctional and abusive relationships, Mines was profoundly curious about how the human nervous system finds resilience despite the cumulative burden of chronic stress and traumatic life events. While earning her doctorate in neuropsychology, she met Mary Iino Burmeister, master of the Art of Compassion, or Jin Shin Jyutsu. Art of Compassion consists of non-invasive touch, using the fingertips, on sites of the body that are similar to acupuncture points.
After the Art of Compassion helped Mines resolve her own trauma and awaken her innate resilience, she began to incorporate it into her clinical research. She discovered that the map of the body she learned from Burmeister sites correlated with the Chinese Extraordinary Meridians or Rivers of Splendor, which develop prenatally. She then began investigating our earliest neurodevelopmental processes and was able to correlate the Extraordinary Meridians with specific embryological events. She found that subtle touch on these sites in combination with trauma resolution amplifies neuroresilience, enhances creativity, restores motivation, and heals the fragmentation and disconnection associated with trauma and shock.
Sharing her personal journey as a Wounded Healer, Mines reveals not only how to unlock the secrets of resilience for individual healing but also how embodied resilience will help us heal our wounded planet.
Personal, lyrical, poetic and steeped in the science of embryogenesis, The Secret to Resilience guides you in reclaiming who you truly are, no matter what overwhelming experience appears to have distracted you from the truth. As we inhabit a world that tests our endurance, resilience, adaptability and alignment, The Secret to Resilience shows us in profoundly personal ways how we have never lost any one of those attributes.
The Secret of Resilience is available for order on INNER TRADITIONS.
Available after book launch in Summer 2023 through:
Available for order now!
ENDORSEMENTS
“The generosity of spirit and commitment to healing that Dr. Mines demonstrates in her work is truly inspirational. She has gained our respect and admiration. She has helped us to effectively support the healing process of the thousands of women and children who seek help from us each year.”
– Anne Tapp, Executive Director, Boulder County Safehouse
“The TARA Approach is a masterful design for regeneration and profound healing. In a world of constant debilitating shock, Stephanie Mines offers skillful means to resolve personal and collective wounding in ways that illuminate as well as heal.”
– Jean Houston, Ph.D.
“The ideas of the TARA Approach are accessible. The biochemistry is relevant, authoritative, up-to-date, and presented as a fascinating account of nature’s handiwork. The techniques are easily applied and are effective.”
– Donna Eden, Author of Energy Medicine
“I have seen the TARA Approach naturally direct mothers and babies to their inner strength and health. I also use the system myself to sustain enduring the long hours and relentless demands of being a caring obstetrician.”
– Jade McGaff, MD
“Stephanie Mines, moves through the complex territory of healing with refreshing grace, candor and immense wisdom.”
– Pat Ogden, Ph.D., Founder of Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute, Author of Trauma and the Body
“Stephanie Mines focuses on giving people simple and effective tools that they can use preventatively in a multitude of potentially traumatic situations.”
– Peter Levine, Ph.D., Founder of Somatic Experiencing, Author of Waking the Tiger, Healing Trauma and Trauma Proofing Your Kids
“Dr. Stephanie Mines has dedicated her life to a brilliant exploration of embryology. In that exploration she has found the secret to resilience that is the key to meeting these chaotic and heartbreaking times.” ~ Dr. Clare Willocks, MD, OBGYN, Founder of Bridging the Healthcare Gap
“Stephanie Mines is a unique resource in the healing world and her work is of inestimable value to the planet.”
– Julie Motz, MPH, Author, Hands of Life
“Stephanie powerfully embodies the teachings she is offering. As a healed healer she is a catalyst and nurturing guide. Her work navigating the delicate terrain caused by shock and trauma is grounded in the body, sophisticated in its thinking and delivered in love. My development as a creative woman has been inspired by Stephanie’s caring presence in my life for the past ten years.”
– Melissa Michaels, Ed.D., Author of Youth on Fire
Learn More About Stephanie Mines' Work Here.