Lauren Mackler has put her heart and soul into Solemate: Master the Art of Aloneness & Transform Your Life, a Hay House publication that walks readers through the importance of finding completion within oneself. She believes that first one must be whole because connecting with others.

She shares her own life story and experience as a prelude and support to the exercise and the guidelines she shares to help readers achieve wholeness.

Chapters like “Uncovering Your Unconditioned Self” talk about how you are born full of all emotions and free to express them. Growing up in a family unit starts affecting how you feel about your emotions and which you start expressing and most particularly repressing. Unprogramming yourselves from this is a very challenging thing to be but can have immense rewards for through this effort you can discover what your true preferences are and then make decisions that are best for you, not what other people may think is best for you.

Mackler continues this process through her “Living Deliberately Versus by Default” chapter where she suggests:

Sending loving messages to yourself
Taking good care of yourself
Do nice things for yourself
Set boundaries with other people
Become your own advocate
Believe in yourself
Be compassionate

She culminates these suggestions with her chapter “Bringing Your Vision to Life,” where she has created exercises to facilitate and expedite a reader’s achievement of the goals of the book. Exercise One identifies the most important attributes of your ideal life, Exercise Two teaches you how to write a Life Vision statement, Exercise Three identifies barriers you may face, Exercise Four helps you narrow an action plan to three specific goals, Exercise Five helps you develop a set of action steps to help you achieve those goals and Exercise Six facilitates the creation of a new life structure.

There is a lot of depth and immense soul in Solemate, and if you are able to read through the over 300 pages of text, you will emerge much more confident and happier about yourself. The exercises to are useful, but definitely involve work and action on your part. This is not the passive, lazy guide to loving yourself. That being said, if you choose to walk through Mackler’s program, you will likely find yourself on the heels of a successful appreciation of yourself and a mastery of the Art of Aloneness. The perfect place to be if you want to fall in love.

T. U. Dawood is a freelance journalist. Check out her self-optimization website Preview Your Life.