Heart Breaking Open: Discovering the Heart Within Heartbreak

This is a book about love, betrayal and transformation. And although we most often think of betrayal in the romantic sense — of a partner or spouse having an affair or our best friend dating our former lover — we are betrayed in big and small ways throughout our lives.

As heartbreaking as any betrayal can be, when it happens to us, we have an opportunity to not only learn from it, but to be transformed. Transformation, ultimately, is what this book is about.

As the subtitle ‘Discovering the Heart within Heartbreak’ implies, the heart doesn’t simply break. In my experience, it breaks open. And in that opening, we discover a whole new way of being; a fearless and more loving way.

By allowing ourselves to move beyond the pain and anguish that follows heartbreak, we find that our hearts are filled with a greater sense of love and compassion than we were aware we were capable of.

While the genesis of this book was my husband’s confession that he was having an affair, what came next surprised me — likely surprised him, too — and proved to me that we always have a choice as to how we respond to life’s biggest challenges.

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Heart Breaking Open Book Cover

We can respond from love or from fear, the two fundamental emotions we humans have as all our emotions arise from one or the other. Guided by a powerful reminder of these choices, I experienced an insight that proved to me that there is a benevolent power that wants only what is best for us.

Prior to, throughout the writing of this book, and still today, my life has been focused on the search for meaning: the search for a sense of permanent happiness and contentment. Rather than try to deny that longing, I have prayed and been guided to follow the path of Spirit.  Each teacher and teaching has led me to the next teacher and teaching until I recognized that the love and happiness, the contentment I had been seeking, was here all along—here in my very own heart—where it has always been.

Heart Breaking Open is a story about the power of surrender, of prayer, and the gifts to be found within life’s most challenging experiences. I share my story so that you, too, may find strength in knowing that when we allow ourselves to be vulnerable; when we allow the Love in our hearts to guide our thoughts, our words, and our actions, we open the door to what’s possible.

The events and experiences that cause us to wonder if we’re doing life ‘right’; the trials that make us feel as if ‘life as we know it is over’ most often become our greatest gifts. While many books have been written from this perspective, I think that what makes Heart Breaking Open unique is that it contains a loud and clear message about trust. Trusting the guidance — our intuitive knowing — is critical if we are to live the life we are here for.

Often considered courageous, the acts and actions that require us to step out of the mold our parents or our culture have prescribed for us provide opportunities that we otherwise would have missed. Freed from the limitations imposed by a fear-based search for security, we find ourselves free to explore and discover how to create a life truly worth living.  This unfettered journey we find ourselves on is, ultimately, a spiritual journey. This is one woman’s story of how hers unfolded.

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What would you do if your husband (partner) told you he (or she) was having an affair?

You trust your partner; that’s why you’re with him. You trust him to be loyal; to be honest and share his intimate life with you alone. But what happens if he strays? Will you respond with compassion or become the wronged, wounded one? Will you become a victim?

Could you open your heart . . . or would you strike out in anger and fear?

My story offers options you might have never imagined; possibilities that few of us consider until the world we inhabit—and the people we think we know—betray us.

From my own dark night of the soul to the freedom that arises when we discover the truth of who we really are, I hope my story will both comfort and encourage you on your own journey.

Thanks to the power of prayer and the Buddhist practice of Metta, (Lovingkindness) my honest and heartfelt story begins and ends in ways that prove that what you think may be the worst moment of your life may just be one of your life’s greatest gifts.

I hope you’ll join me on this journey to the inner life; to a life that not only experiences the pain of betrayal but rewrites the idea of what it means to experience heartbreak. Here in this broken open heart is where we discover the joy that awaits when Lovingkindness is the choice we make.