True Human: Reimagining Ourselves at the End of Our World

by Samantha Sweetwater

You feel it… a fundamental shift. Normal isn’t normal anymore. You're not alone, and you're not crazy.

True Human offers a path for those who can't (and won’t) look away from reality; for those who sense that personal transformation and our collective future are inseparable.

In this fierce and honest work, Samantha Sweetwater weaves storytelling with cultural history, deep ecology, systemic insight, and spirituality to help you meet this unique historical moment as a catalyst for transformation, fulfillment, and purpose.

Drawing on her work guiding thousands—from tech executives to elite athletes to suburban mothers—she doesn't offer easy answers or false comfort. Instead, she

Sensemaking through turbulence, into emergenceSpiritual practices to nourish clarity and resilience without denialTools to heal despair and trauma, while reclaiming belonging and wholenessA living vision of a future worth loving and fighting forA poetic, provocative invitation into a kinship journey of devotion, sovereignty, and co-creation, True Human isn't about transcending your humanity or perfecting yourself, it's about becoming more deeply, courageously, and luminously human.

For anyone longing to live with more joy, meaning, and authenticity as we reimagine ourselves and our world, this book is your companion for the road ahead.

384 pages, Paperback

Published November 21, 2025

About the author

Samantha Sweetwater is a master facilitator, executive coach, and wisdom guide who has spent three decades helping thousands navigate personal and collective transformation. Founder of Dancing Freedom, Peacebody Japan, and One Life Circle, she has trained hundreds of facilitators worldwide. She partners with world-shaping leaders to awaken, heal, and align impact with human and planetary flourishing. Her work invites you to come alive and remember your place within the Song of Life. Samantha lives on the fog-kissed slopes of Mt. Tamalpais in Northern California.

Reviews

[Tor H · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very poignant

[Michael Sasson · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The world we were born into no longer exists... The world that will be and become our future is a function of our love and courage... It will rise on the basis of what we choose to attend to and how we attend to it. It is up to you to birth it with your love. It is up to us."

I hunger for the world to which Samantha Sweetwater points and I want others to read her book to inspire a playful, audacious hunger in them, too. I applaud her successes at articulating spiritual experience while being tethered to shared, consensual reality -- no spiritual bypass here and a sophisticated, feels-true way of describing the interplay between vision/prayer and external reality. Deep bow. I want to (continue to become) more and more the kind of human that is pointed to here. And the book is fun to read which counts for something.

Sweetwater's grounded respect for indigenous leadership and a consistent anti-colonial lens leads the reader in ways that make it easy to understand those things as common sense (even if not as common as desired in the world as it is). The brief and intermittent bridges to social struggle are written in ways that make clear she is rooted in those possibilities around race, gender, genocide, war and colonialism and I couldn't help but wonder if the lack of more attention had something to do with who she expects her average reader to be and a desire for clear but soft and not overbearing invitation for those people to explore what might make sense for them. Social class is mostly invisible and the examples of people shared in the book belong mostly to elite and professional classes and historic working class movements who fought in alignment with most of the values articulated in this book are not referenced which saddened me -- in part because I didn't find the vision for how structural change might happen as convincing as the rest of the book and in part because it would make it easier for me to convince social and labor movement organizers to engage with the book in ways that I think would help them be both more effective and more fun to be around.