Living Better with Yourself
A Practical Guide to Embodied Growth
by Michael Conti
Living Better with Yourself is a self-development journaling book for people who want to understand themselves more fully, and not only from the neck up. It takes the body as its starting point for change and works alongside your thoughts and feelings, so that over time they begin to inform each other rather than pull in different directions.
Across ten areas of what it means to be human, you’ll find 180 exercises and more than 50 guided audio recordings to work through at your own pace, with a close look throughout at how trauma shapes the way we act and feel.
Why the book starts with the body
The mind is a remarkable thing. Its job is to keep us safe, scanning for danger and steering us towards what feels good, but it can also talk us round in circles, so caught up in its own reasoning that we lose sight of where we actually are. Many of the patterns that keep us stuck made sense once. They helped when they first formed, and we carry on using them long after they’ve stopped being useful, usually without noticing.
The body holds a different kind of knowledge. It remembers things the mind has long since filed away, and it can steady us when our thinking is running ahead of itself. In this book I treat the two as partners, a little like two people learning to dance together, so that the mind can give meaning to what you experience and the body can give you somewhere solid to stand.
What’s inside Living Better with Yourself
Each chapter begins with where you are now: how you experience your life today, and how your history has shaped that. From there, it offers exercises to help you work with what you find, rather than only think about it.
You’ll spend time with fear, anger, shame and guilt, and with the pull between the thinking and feeling sides of yourself. There are practical ways to work with your inner critic and with the “shoulds” that quietly run so much of daily life, and a closer look at your relationship with control and your need for safety. Later chapters turn towards the parts of yourself that are harder to accept, and towards building a steadier sense of your own worth.
01 – Please Don’t Skip Me!
02 – Our Building Blocks
03 – Our Response to Stress
04 – On Thinking and Feeling
05 – On Fear
06 – On Being Angry
07 – On Shame and Guilt
08 – On the Inner Critical Voice
09 – On ‘Should’ Statements
10 – On Control
11 – On Being Good and Not-So-Good
12 – On Safety and Vulnerability
13 – On Self-Esteem
180 exercises to build self-understanding at your own pace
Over 50 guided audio recordings, walking you through key exercises
Space throughout to write and sketch your own responses
Ten core areas of the human experience, explored chapter by chapter
A dedicated focus on how trauma shows up in everyday life
What readers say
The audios really succeed in giving one the experiential feeling of being guided by a therapist.
Liz
Living Better with Yourself finally helped me integrate my body much more in my personal growth.
Daniel
The chapter on trauma was so helpful to understand why I act and feel the way I do.
Anna
Gentle with trauma, patient with growth
Trauma isn’t only about what happened. Very often, what leaves the deepest mark is not having had the support we needed at the time. What stays with us is a memory that still takes up space in the present, along with the defences we built so we wouldn’t have to feel that way again. Those defences were there for good reason, so the book doesn’t ask you to break through them. Instead, it helps you build enough safety for your guard to lower a little at a time, so other ways of living can start to come into view.
That takes time, and there’s no prize for finishing quickly. Growth like this is closer to how a plant grows than to how a project gets delivered: pulling at it won’t make it grow faster, it only disturbs the roots. Some exercises will land straight away, while others you may only come back to months later. It’s also worth remembering that you aren’t a problem to be fixed. You live within a context, and the family and culture you grew up in shape you as much as anything inside you.
Listen to the guided audio
More than 50 free recordings accompany key exercises, so you can be guided through them rather than trying to read and practise at the same time. You’ll find them on most streaming platforms, so you can listen wherever you already do. You can also stream or download them from the audio library.
Listen on: RSS · Spotify · Apple Music · YouTube Music · Amazon Music · Deezer
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Read Chapter Two for free
Chapter Two, Our Body, is the chapter that sets up everything else in the book. It explains why the body is the starting point for change and gives you a first taste of the exercises. Leave your email and I’ll send you a link to download it.
How to use the book
Many readers work through it on their own, while others use it alongside therapy or coaching. Therapists and coaches also use it with the people they work with, picking out chapters that fit what a client is exploring.
A book can take you a long way, but much of what hurts us was formed in relationship, and that kind of hurt tends to heal in relationship too. If at some point you’d like someone alongside you, individual therapy is where that can happen.
Buy Living Better with Yourself
Paperback: AbeBooks · Amazon.de · Amazon.es · Amazon.co.uk · Amazon.com
E-book: Kindle · Apple Books
About the author
I’m Michael Conti, an integrative and somatic therapist and clinical supervisor, also trained in EMDR.
I wrote this book after years of doing the same work with clients, wanting to offer a structure people could use between sessions or without sessions at all. For a long time I lived mostly in my head myself, and reconnecting with my body changed how I see myself and how I relate to others. A lot of what I learned along the way is in these pages.
