Courtney Stough Launches Prana Rising to Help Readers Reclaim Their Personal Power
After years of professional achievement, chronic pain, and disconnection, corporate attorney and entrepreneur Courtney Stough discovered that the answer was not to abandon the life she had built, but to learn how to inhabit it differently. Her debut book explores what happens when we finally listen to what has been asking for our attention all along.
Atlanta, Georgia – September 15, 2026 – Courtney Stough had spent years building a life that, by almost every conventional measure, was working. She graduated from Yale and Tulane Law, practiced corporate law for nearly fourteen years, became a partner at an AmLaw 100 firm, served as a Deputy General Counsel, helped build a cannabis insurance company, and created a family life near the people she loved. Yet beneath the accomplishments, she was increasingly disconnected from her body, her intuition, and the parts of herself that made her feel most alive.
That disconnection eventually reached a breaking point. Sitting on the floor of her young son’s nursery, Stough recognized that something had to change. The months and years that followed included difficult personal decisions, including a period of separation from her husband, but ultimately not the entirely new life she had imagined. She and her husband reconciled, welcomed a daughter, and returned to the same home. What changed was her relationship with the life she was living.
That realization became the foundation for Prana Rising: Reclaim Your Life Force & Amplify Your Personal Power. Part teaching memoir and part practical framework, the book examines what happens when someone has built a life that looks successful from the outside but no longer feels fully alive from within.
Stough’s story began long before that breaking point. In her early thirties, she was picking up five to eight prescriptions at a time while trying to manage chronic pelvic pain, reflux, anxiety, and brain fog. She had become accustomed to treating each symptom, pushing through discomfort, and continuing to perform at a high level. Over time, however, what she had understood as perseverance began to look more like disconnection.
“I had built a life that needed me to be chemically altered just to get through it,” Stough says. “And I called that success.”
The unraveling wasn't a single event but a gradual accumulation of signals Stough had learned to manage rather than hear. Drawing on more than a decade of personal journals, extensive reading, therapy, and deep self-study, she began writing Prana Rising to make sense of that journey.
Tracing her experience backward, Stough came to understand that the breaking point was not where her story began; it was simply the moment she could no longer ignore what had been asking for her attention.
“My body was giving me information long before I knew how to listen to it,” Stough says. “The breaking point got my attention, but it is not where the story began. I don’t want anyone to have to reach the point I reached before they realize something needs to change.”
Rather than requiring a dramatic reinvention or the abandonment of everything that came before, Stough began to see transformation as a process of returning to herself: listening to her body, trusting her intuition, reconnecting with creativity and relationships, and learning to distinguish what genuinely generated energy from what quietly depleted it.
Stough did not ultimately leave her profession or create an entirely different identity. She continues to practice corporate law as Of Counsel, and she and her husband rebuilt their marriage. Her story became less about starting over and more about coming full circle.
“Sometimes the way forward is not about becoming someone new,” Stough says. “It is about remembering who you were before you became so disconnected from yourself.”
In Prana Rising, Stough uses prana, the Sanskrit concept of life force, as a framework for understanding that connection. She explores the forces that can quietly drain it, including roles, habits, expectations, and inherited beliefs, and introduces four practices she calls the Four Energy Generators™: Embodiment, Mindfulness, Creativity, and Community.
The book also introduces Blissence™, Stough’s term for the experience of being fully present in one’s own essence. Rather than promising a perfected life, Prana Rising offers a different proposition: that people can learn to recognize the signals they have been overriding and reconnect with an inner compass that was there before the noise.
There is a literal piece of Stough’s childhood on the cover of the book.
When she began looking for an image that captured what Prana Rising meant to her, she went into her parents’ attic and found a watercolor she had painted as a young girl. Rainbow colors filled the page, paint dripped downward, and her maiden name appeared in block letters in the corner.
She chose a digitized, reimagined version of that painting for the cover.
For Stough, the image became a visual reminder of the central idea behind Prana Rising: sometimes what we spend years searching for is not something we need to create, but something we need to remember.
About Prana Rising
Prana Rising: Reclaim Your Life Force & Amplify Your Personal Power is a teaching memoir and practical guide for people who have built lives that work but are no longer sure those lives feel fully like their own. Blending personal narrative with mindfulness, somatic practices, psychology, spirituality, and leadership, Stough explores burnout as a deeper experience of disconnection from the body, intuition, creativity, relationships, and what makes us feel alive.
The book invites readers to move beyond whether their lives look good on paper and ask whether they are actually inhabiting those lives.
Availability
Publication Date: September 15, 2026
Kindle, Paperback & Audiobook: Available on Amazon
Hardcover: Available through IngramSpark
Review copies and interview requests: Josh Schwartz, Pubvendo
About Courtney Stough
Courtney Stough is a corporate attorney, coach, and speaker who helps high-functioning women reclaim their life force. She lives in Atlanta with her husband and two children.
