Coming Alive

“There is something indescribably beautiful about living life in integrity. The tools Barry and Phil teach in Coming Alive gave me the courage and clarity to align myself with the truth—no matter how hard or painful it seemed at the time. It’s an incredibly fulfilling and meaningful way to live.”—Gwyneth Paltrow “What a gift! A riveting exploration of four (bone-chillingly relatable) modern ailments and their thrillingly practical solutions … Barry and Phil have written a manual for moving beyond impulsivity, exhaustion, demoralization, and victimhood, toward a life of self-control, vitality, optimism, and resilience. Singular in its approach and deeply spiritual in its concerns, Coming Alive is a book I’ll be pressing on friends and foes alike.”—Maria Semple, author of Where’d You Go, Bernadette and Today Will Be Different “‘Practical’ and ‘effective’ are words psychology has always been afraid to embrace. But after working with Barry and Phil for years, I can tell you that they deliver spiritual and psychological transformation. The results, at least for me, have been life changing.”—Adam McKay, Academy Award–winning writer, director, and producer “When I was going through the most difficult years of my life, I was able to use this method to find my strength. We all have the ability to save ourselves, yet we need guidance when we are lost. In Coming Alive you can find the road map to enlightenment.”—Drew Barrymore “Part X is another way of describing the addict mind, the obsessive mind, the Jungian shadow, or any fear- or anger-based thought or action. It’s been Phil and Barry’s collective life work to deconstruct Part X and explain it to the rest of us mortals so that we can work with it and not be a slave to it.”—Hank Azaria

Barry Michels and Phil Stutz are the New York Times bestselling authors of The Tools and the resident therapists on Goop. They have appeared on Nightline, Charlie Rose, and The Show and have been featured in such print and online publications as The New Yorker, Time, Psychology Today, and Vanity Fair. Michels, a psychotherapist, has a BA from Harvard, a law degree from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MSW from the University of Southern California. Stutz, a psychiatrist, graduated Phi Beta Kappa from City College in New York and received his MD from New York University.