“Soul Can You” by Lisa Gilbert, MD

Soul Can You

Lisa Gilbert, MD
Archangel Ink (2025)
ISBN: 978-1950043637
Reviewed by Paige Lovitt for Reader Views (12/2025)

Soul Can You is a beautiful memoir written by Dr. Lisa Gilbert, who is not only a psychiatrist but also a devoted spiritual seeker. In this memoir, she skillfully manages to intersect psychiatry, spirituality, and transformative practice. She takes us through her life, starting from painful events that happened in childhood, and leads us through a path that allowed her to awaken her soul through trauma healing, creative breakthroughs, and spiritual awakening.

Gilbert’s memoir shares her clinical and personal experiences with Holotropic Breathwork. This is a healing modality that she attributes to her own healing and her work with patients. She shares painful stories about uncovering repressed memories of childhood abuse and her long path to recovery. Sharing her experiences from her early life will help readers relate to her more as a human being, especially those of us who shared similar experiences. We can see that her healing knowledge comes from more than just her extensive education, which was required for her to become a psychiatrist.

I appreciate that at the beginning of her book, she provides definitions for the terminology that will be used in her story. This helps readers understand complex terms like “trauma kinetics” and “transcendent kinetics as they are being presented. She does not shy away from difficult material, such as discussing family dynamics, loss, and grief. Readers will feel her compassionate presence as she guides them through her journey.

I felt my soul awakening as I read. I also found myself having very interesting dreams when I read before going to sleep. I cannot say that they were all good dreams; however, I can say that Dr. Gilbert’s work has inspired me to dig in deeper for not only healing but also working on expanding my own consciousness. I am going to investigate Holotropic Breathwork, as I felt that it resonated with me. She truly has a gift for inspiring and motivating others to follow this path of healing.

The discussions of NOSC (mystical experiences, meditation, or spontaneous phenomena) put that book within a larger tradition of contemplative science, as it allows for the subjective nature of the spiritual experience to be involved while still maintaining a clinical perspective. As a counselor, but not a therapist, my heart yearns for the people that I work with, especially the veterans and my first responders, to be able to participate in this kind of healing.

Overall, Soul Can You is essential reading for both seekers and healers. It offers hope for people to be able to learn how to face trauma, have a spiritual awakening, and experience transformation. This is the perfect resource for those who are drawn to Holotropic Breathwork and who would like to integrate psychology with spirituality!