This book has been recommended numerous times by one of the coaches I follow, so I decided to finally take a look. LePera is a proponent of “holistic psychology.” The short version is that many of us act or react in ways that we don’t like – whether that’s emotional outbursts, substance abuse, endlessly doomscrolling, getting caught up in relationships we know are bad for us, etc. – but we don’t know how to escape those patterns. Information is not enough. Getting out of these patterns involves “doing the work” (“the work” is always in italics in the book) or “SelfHealing.” It involves listening to our body, mind, and soul, and doing small but important everyday tasks to heal our inner wounds. She talks about everything from deep breathing to witnessing our own emotional reactions as they occur in our body to establishing boundaries. It is, as she says, holistic. My main critique regards the earlier sections, where she’s talking about how chronic stress and unhealed trauma manifest as illnesses in the body. I’m not saying that they DON’T, but LePera veers dangerously close to the “maybe it’s just stress” brand of wellness. (She never actually advocates abandoning professional medical care, but she definitely implies that most of our physical problems can be healed by “doing the work.” I would like state for the record that deep breathing isn’t a replacement for chemotherapy, and that if you can’t create your own neurochemicals, store-bought is fine.) On the whole, though, I liked this book and it gave me a lot to chew on.