Waking Up Alone (Navigating the Narrow Passage Through Master-Slave Narratives)

In this unflinching and vulnerable book, psychologist Nicole Wordlaw exposes the impact of intergenerational trauma and internalized race and gender narratives, through the lens of a Black woman seeking spiritual freedom on her own terms.

Waking Up Alone is part memoir, part map: a vulnerable, fiercely honest exploration of what it means to awaken as a Black woman in a world built on master-slave narratives, gender roles, and spiritual illusions.

Clinical psychologist Dr. Nicole Wordlaw—Stanford and Berkeley-trained, longtime Buddhist practitioner, daughter of a Black father and white mother, and former partner of a well-respected spiritual teacher—traces her journey from a little girl seeking love through obedience, to a woman unraveling the cultural myths that shaped her. Through the lenses of race, womanhood, and power, she reveals how systems of domination live not only in institutions but inside our most intimate relationships, and in the stories we’re taught to believe about ourselves.

Eerily prescient in the era of the Epstein files, the book chronicles the author's relationship with a prominent male spiritual teacher—its highs, shadow side, and entanglements—and how the author ultimately finds her own path to awakening.

Waking Up Alone invites readers to recognize the cages they’ve inherited, question the roles they’ve been taught to play, and listen for freedom’s quiet song within. This is a book for anyone ready to unlearn, to awaken, and to remember who they were before the world told them who to be.