Rachel’s Ruminations January 2024 Edition
Book Review: How To Be the Love You Seek: Break Cycles, Find Peace & Heal Your Relationships
by Dr. Nicole LePera
I try to limit my time on social media to about 5 minutes per day and I am active on three sites (Instagram, Facebook, and Threads). The main reason why I check Instagram daily is that I find Dr. LePera’s (@the.holistic.psychologist) content engaging and informative; she is a huge social media influencer with almost 8 million followers. Several years ago, I reviewed her first book How to Do the Work for this column and was super stoked when I learned that she was releasing a new book How to Be the Love You Seek late November 2023.
Like her first book, it is written for both the lay person and medical professional in an easy-to-read format filled with checklists, charts, daily check-ins, journal prompts, and exercises. This is the first book I have read that also includes QR codes that you can scan with your phone that take you to guided breathing exercises and meditations; I anticipate we will see more of this innovative technique in future books! Dr. LePera includes many personal anecdotes about her healing journey along with client stories which typically make nonfiction work more interesting and reinforce what she is trying to teach us.
Her goals in writing this book are to guide you to stronger relationships, more joy, and a clearer path to your future. She provides a road map on how to respond to life’s challenges from a place of healing and inner peace. “She shares information and tools on how to reconnect with your body, mind, and soul. She teaches you how to recognize your conditioned relationship responses, how to identify and meet your needs, how to soothe overwhelming emotions, and ultimately how to reconnect with your heart’s innate and limitless capacity to love…It is not until you are connected to and in care of your own heart that you can truly connect with and tend to the heart of another (page7).”
Overall, I enjoyed her first book more (I gave that a 5-star review and this one a 4) and plan to continue to enjoy her daily social media sound bites. She has also written a workbook which I have not perused but you may find helpful if you resonate with her work. As the next big holiday—Valentine’s Day—approaches consider giving yourself this valuable resource on self-love and how to improve your relationship with yourself and others.
For those of you who are not into self-help nonfiction, I would like to give a shout out to Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver which is a modern-day retelling of Dickens’ David Copperfield. I have read both and enjoyed Kingsolver’s rendition more than the original.
Rachel Oppitz, ND
