The Portal of Heartbreak

UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT: The following transcript may contain typographical errors or other mistakes due to inconsistencies in audio quality, background noise, or other factors. We cannot guarantee its precision or completeness. We encourage you to use this as a supplement to your own notes and recollection of the session. 

 

Tami Simon: Hello, friends. My name’s Tami Simon, and I’m the founder of Sounds True, and I want to welcome you to the Sounds True podcast, Insights at the Edge.

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In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is Sara Avant Stover. Let me tell you a little bit about Sara. She’s an author, a certified IFS, Internal Family Systems practitioner, a yoga and meditation instructor, and a teacher of women’s spirituality, entrepreneurship, and leadership. Her work integrating Buddhism, embodiment, and psychology has uplifted the lives of countless women worldwide. She’s the author of The Book of SHE and also a new book from Sounds True. It’s called Handbook for the Heartbroken: A Woman’s Path from Devastation to Rebirth. Sara, welcome.

 

Sara Avant Stover: Hi, Tami. Thank you. It’s good to be here.

 

TS: We’re talking about your new book on heartbreak, and of course this is a sensitive topic to talk about, and one of the things you write about is that we live in a heartbreak-illiterate culture. And I notice even as we enter this conversation, I would love if we could set a tone of heartbreak literacy and what that means to you and how we set that tone.

 

SAS: Thank you for that invitation, Tami. The word that comes to mind when you say that is for us to take on a disposition of tenderness. I think that living in our world, there’s a way that we need to walk around, even in our homes, with a certain level of guardedness to us just because there can be a lot of harshness in the world. And when we are facing heartbreak, it’s an incredibly tender time, so it requires a softening.

And even right now, maybe we can all just feel ourselves softening more into if we’re sitting on a surface, or just leaning into that, softening into that and relaxing our shoulders, dropping into our breath. And even just feeling our hearts a little bit more, even dropping our awareness from our heads down into our hearts because being with heartbreak in a more literate way just requires this heart-centered tenderness.

 

TS: Thank you. It’s a beautiful way to begin tenderizing ourselves, softening ourselves. You don’t write a book like Handbook for Heartbroken without knowing from your own personal experience, heartbreak, and you write about it as a sacred portal. And I’d love if you could share a bit about your own journey, passage into, through heartbreak and the discovery of its nature as a sacred portal.

 

SAS: Sure. In this book, I share the stories of serial heartbreaks that I experienced between 2016 and 2020 that took me down in every area of my life, in my intimate relationships, my social status and standing, my health, my career, my finances, and even just my very sense of self and my place in the world.

And the very first heartbreak, which came in February of 2016 happened one evening when my former fiancé came home and told me that he had been cheating on me. And it wasn’t just with one person one time, it was with many people many times over many years. I came to see that night, even today, eight years later, I see that night as really like a fault line running through my life where everything that I was, everything that I knew was on one side of that line. And there was a whole new experience, a whole new identity on the other side of that line.

And actually the title for this book came to me just a few months after that initial heartbreak. And I even set out to start to work on the proposal at that time, but then other heartbreaks began to strike and I realized I still had a lot … Life was still teaching me a lot about heartbreak. So in 2016 when that title came, I still had several more years of this deep life experience, steep initiation to really understand heartbreak.

And when I finally came out the other side of it at the end of 2020, I was a completely different person than I was at the start of it. I saw that there was nothing that I could have done with my own will, with my own plans for myself and my life. Because I’ve been a very dedicated spiritual practitioner and dedicated psychological inquirer for decades, a couple of decades moving on to three decades. But none of those things could take me to the place that these heartbreaks took me to, completely transformed.

And I don’t say this in a Pollyanna-ish kind of a way, but looking back now, I am grateful for those experiences because they evolved me in ways that I most needed to and ways that I most wanted to, and they helped to prepare me for a greater level of service that I feel like I’m now able to offer, especially with the world being in the state that it’s in right now.

 

TS: So when I started reading Handbook for the Heartbroken and right in the beginning you share this element of your personal story of this partner of yours who betrayed you through infidelity in your relationship. I thought, “Oh, okay, here’s the constellating story.” Little did I realize that your heartbreak story had several more installments over this five-year period that were stunningly terrible, if I would just put it that way. And I was unprepared when I picked up Handbook for the Heartbroken, how heartbroken this journey was going to be. So I wonder here at the outset, if you could just share a bit more about that to give people the full picture of what you went through.

 

SAS: Sure. And now when I talk about it, it seems unbelievable to me how extreme it was. It was like one worst nightmare after another, after another, after another, after another, after another. Literally that’s what it was.

So the first one was infidelity and also want to name that these were like dominoes. They were all connected to each other, which is another thing that I really speak about in the book is these cascading losses, how when we get taken down by one thing, we get weakened in terms of just our own standing in ourselves and also in our resources. And then that can create these subsequent losses.

So one of the things that was at play with my former fiancé and I was this question about whether or not we wanted to have children. He decided towards the end of our relationship that he was a no. And so I was in a place of really feeling into do I want to stay in this relationship and also be a no, or do I want to leave and be a yes and make this happen in some other way?

And so when I found out about the infidelity, I had a lot of rage that he hadn’t just told me the truth years earlier when I would’ve been in my earlier 30s and had more of an open stretch to leave and have a child on my own. So when I left that relationship, I was very much focused on trying to make that happen for myself.

And in one of my, actually my first relationship outside of that ended engagement, much to my surprise, because this had never happened to me before, I got pregnant. I had some disbelief that I could even get pregnant in the first place. So when this happened, I was very shocked and also very conflicted. Do I want to have this child because I don’t know this person very well, or not and move in the direction of an abortion? And more things came to light about this person that led me to realize that I needed to have an abortion. There was more infidelity, and there was a larger story which I share in the book.

And that was utterly heartbreaking for me because then I was 39 and had an additional devastation to work through. And one of the things that I promised myself if I were to have an abortion was that I would give myself about a year to heal. And after that year, if it felt right, I’d move forward with trying to have a child on my own. So I did that and I started to move into fertility treatments. I did several IUI, intrauterine inseminations, which are less invasive than IVF. None of them worked. Then I moved on to IVF. Both of those cycles failed, even though both of them seemed to me and my doctor that they were going to work. At the end of each of them, there was some sort of a twist where we saw that they failed.

And in my mind, I built up this hope that somehow I was going to get a baby out of that, and somehow that was going to be my redemption. After all of those challenges that I was going to have this happily ever after of, “Look, I made it happen. I had a baby out of all this. Isn’t this amazing?” And so when I found out that that didn’t work, I don’t even know what the words are, I guess it’s just a devastation, and I didn’t know what to hope for anymore. I didn’t know what to work for anymore. I didn’t know what my dream was anymore.

And in the midst of all of this, I felt like I was treading water in my work. So before the first heartbreak, I was really at the top of my career. My second book had come out, my work was thriving. But gradually after those first three heartbreaks and all that I was just trying to manage in my physicality and in my grief process and not having anyone to lean on or fall back on, my work was really being compromised, so much so that I reached a point where I just said, “I can’t do this anymore.”

I realized that the most important thing that I could do for myself was to close everything down. Even though my work, which I’d been doing for two decades, since my early 20s, I feel it’s my soul’s calling. I feel it’s what I’m here to do. I had poured everything into it, all my money, all my heart, all my energy, so much of my identity wrapped up in it. And I started dismantling it piece by piece and knew I just needed to step back and really ask myself, “Where’s life trying to take me here?” And really questioning if it was not this work, maybe there was another direction life was trying to move me in and I just needed to stop trying to force it.

So for the first time in my life, I got a job-job, as we say as entrepreneurs, a J-O-B. And that afforded me the space to just step out of the public light, to stop needing to show up and support other people and to really take space to heal myself. And at the same time that I did that, I felt so in over my head financially, yet I was in the most solid place I’d ever been financially at the start of all of this. And some very unforeseen challenges came my way, including a challenge with the IRS that was related to a misguided CPA that I worked with. That led me to be many thousands of dollars in debt to the IRS. And now I know the IRS is the last person or place you ever want to be indebted to.

Some additional surgeries that I had had for health challenges that arose from all of the stress, my fertility treatments, and those years where I was just struggling to make ends meet, it landed me in the place of realizing that my best path forward was going to be declare bankruptcy. That was one of my greatest fears, but just needing to dismantle my business.

I needed to have a really, really clear, open, honest conversation with myself and my life and to see what is my next right step? Where are you trying to lead me here? So I was led to a place where I just had to let everything go and take everything down to the ground zero and stay in the place of not knowing, and then to see step by step where life wanted me to go from there.

 

TS: Well, thank you for sharing all of that, Sara. And I think by sharing your story, you open up for all of us, these different kinds of raw pain that many of us come to in our own way in our own lives. Maybe not in the same kind of cascade that you described, of course not. But in our own experience, we touch on some aspect of that. And I’m curious to hear what you learned that could help any of us who might be suffering in some way, in some aspect of our own passage, about metabolizing pain, entering our pain when events like this occur, devastating events.

 

SAS: Feeling our pain is the way through. It’s the only way through. If we don’t feel our pain, we’re going to get stuck. If we don’t feel our pain, we’re not going to have the rebirth that we want. The feeling is the engine of change. It’s the engine of transformation. And it’s not something that we’re taught how to do. Not only do we live in a heartbreak-illiterate world, we live in a very pain-averse world. And so there’s a way that we need to really get back to the basics when we’re in a heartbreak on a number of levels.

And one of those levels is to slow down, come back to the body and take time to be with the pain, whether that’s our grief, whether that’s our anger, whether that’s the actual emotional pain, whether that’s physical pain, if you are working with physical injury or illness of some sort, but we’re not going to get through it without doing that.

 

TS: I would love to hear more because of course we hear that, feel our pain, turn towards our pain, don’t avoid it, you have to go into it. And yet, there’s only so much you can go into it and then you’re like, “I got to stop. This isn’t going anywhere.” Should I be alternating between? Should I be doing something else? How do I actually work with it? And you know a lot about this, so tell us more.

 

SAS: There’s one story that I share in the book about a particular day that I remember very vividly where I could hardly function, I was in so much pain. I was trying to sit down at my desk and get some work done that I needed to get work done. I had deadlines and gratefully, I was meeting with my mentor that day over Skype. And I sat down and I told her, I said, “I can’t function I’m in so much pain.” And she gave me some really simple but powerful guidance.

And she said, “When we get off of this call, put on some comfortable clothes, T-shirt, sweatpants, something like that. Get back into bed, pull down the shades, close the blinds, get under the blanket, and just start by just noticing in your body, even just for one breath, or if one breath is too much, even just half a breath, like one inhale or one exhale where you’re feeling the pain.” And then she said, “And take a little break after that if you need to. Just think about something else and then try it again. But when you’re doing that, when you’re feeling that sensation in your body, drop the story about it and just feel the sensation.”

And so when I got off the call with her, I so wanted to avoid that. I wanted to do something else like go for a walk or check my emails or have a snack. But I knew that all those things were only going to make me feel worse. And I knew that even though I felt like feeling the pain was going to kill me, that she was right and that somehow that was my way forward. So I did what she asked me to. I got into bed, closed the blinds, I pulled up the covers, and I just started with that first breath, with that first sensation in my chest, my heart. And I did that for one breath and I thought, “Wow, I did it. Okay, let me try it again.” And I think I stayed there for about an hour and it fortified something in me. It helped me to see this pain isn’t killing me and there’s actually something to this.

And that gave me the courage to just start to create these little pockets. They don’t need to be huge pockets, just little pockets of being with it, feeling it, just like that. Super simple, just dropping the story, feeling the sensation, even just for a breath or two. And when we do those in little pockets enough, that starts to metabolize the pain. And then something else can come through and that something else is unique for each of us, but the pain becomes a doorway to a different experience.

 

TS: You offer the metaphor, and you mentioned already that a passage like this through heartbreak can involve going over a chasm. And the metaphor you use is this tightrope over the chasm that we have to walk when we’re in a heartbreak journey, and that you can’t rush it. You can’t rush walking over a tightrope, over a chasm. And I thought that was just so useful because I think we’re all so eager to get out of pain like, “I’d like to get to the other side. Where’s the other side? When’s it coming? Please can I get there yesterday or at least one second from now?” Not, “Oh my God, this might take a while.”

 

SAS: Absolutely. And I had that orientation too, or parts of me did. Parts of me were just wanting it to be over, resisting it every step of the way, hating it, cursing my life, and also really acknowledging, especially when more and more heartbreak started happening, the things that I’m doing are not shifting this. I need to just be here, be fully in my experience and let it take as long as it takes and just keep putting one foot in front of the other, and that’s the tightrope.

It’s like we can’t see. I wanted the new five-year vision. I wanted even the new one-month vision, and there wasn’t any, the uncertainty was so heightened. And so it helps us just to manage our expectations, to pull back and recognize that when we’re in heartbreak territory, we can’t operate the way that we do when we’re in normal life is working okay territory. It’s a different set of rules. And one of those rules is to let go of expected outcomes, to let go of agendas. And again, the word simplicity comes back is just to get super, super simple.

 

TS: At the end of Handbook for the Heartbroken, you write about how one of the things your students and clients say is that they appreciate working with you because you don’t judge their experience. You’ve been through so much yourself that you don’t judge it when other people come to you and say, “I’m going through a bankruptcy,” or this or that.

And I thought to myself, I noticed as I kept reading the book, I started having a judgmental attitude and I was like, “What’s going on, Tami?” And you direct people to inquire into their judgment and ask, “Well, what’s underneath that?” And I think it’s this idea that somehow something’s wrong with us when we’re in pain for an extended period of time. When bad things keep happening, seemingly, it’s like, there must be something wrong with me. So I’d like to know how you were able to get through your own self-judgment like, “What’s wrong with me? What do I have on the bottom of my shoe that I keep attracting men like this?” or whatever it might be.

 

SAS: Well, at a certain point, I started to feel like I was cursed. And actually what helped me, well, a couple of things really helped me to come to a place of deeper self-acceptance, which I’m very grateful to say has continued to this day. That’s one of the gifts of this portal of heartbreak is the incredible opening of self-love and self-acceptance that I have now.

So a couple things supported me, and one was being in the presence of other people who had no judgment of me. And particularly my closest mentor, whom I already mentioned, some of these things that I revealed to her before I had revealed them to anyone else, I had a lot of shame about it. And I’d come to the session and just force myself to say the words out loud of what I was grappling with. And I would often preface it by saying, “I’m really embarrassed to share this. I feel a lot of shame and self-criticism about it.” And I would say it and some of these things, she would tell me that she had experienced the same thing too. Or there would just be no shock at all in her system, but just a real receiving of what I had just landed in the space.

And so that helped me gradually over time just to feel a sense of relaxation like, “Okay. Yeah, maybe there isn’t something wrong with me.” And she would often just point me back to the larger human experience and seeing how these are universal things that millions of other people, maybe billions of other people are experiencing right now. And over time, I started to be able to take that into myself.

And the other thing that really supported me and that was also involved in the work that she and I did together was the psychotherapeutic model of internal family systems or IFS. And starting to work with those voices inside that were judgmental and harsh towards me trying to hurry me up, telling me there was something wrong with me. And just starting to come more in relationship with those inner voices rather than letting them take over and dictate how I was going to view myself or my life circumstances.

 

TS: I’d love to hear more about that and more about, if you will, your IFS guide to working with the heartbreak passage. Because I think many of us might have some level of familiarity with internal family systems. We know we have parts inside and different parts tend to take over. But how we can actually work with those parts ourselves when we’re really suffering, that’s a lot harder to have real facility with that. So I’d love to learn from your experience.

 

SAS: One of my favorite ways to talk about it is first at the metaphorical level, which I think is really also helpful when we’re talking about the heartbreak experience because this takes everything to a more extreme level.

So the metaphor that I like to use and that’s often used when speaking about IFS is of the sun and the clouds. So we could say that the sun is our essential nature, like in Buddhism, it’s our Buddha nature, and the sun is always shining. Even on a cloudy day when you can’t see the sun, it’s still there. When you take off in an airplane and you go up above the cloud level, it’s bright blue skies and sunny. And then there’s the clouds, and the clouds are our parts.

So in the example that I just gave, those clouds were those voices of self-judgment and self-criticism, and sometimes they would get so strong that they would cloud over the sun. They would block the light of the sun. So I would feel like I had no access to a wider perspective or to the space in me that could have compassion for my experience. And so when we are heartbroken, we can often feel like we’re just in a perpetually cloudy day or a perpetually foggy day or stormy day where the sun is nowhere in sight.

And so if we can keep that in mind when we’re in those very, very dark corners that the sun is still here. And we’ve all had those experiences of when you feel like yourself and you feel really at home in yourself, you feel really connected. And so when we’re in those dark corners, we can have that memory that’s still here. It’s just completely clouded over right now by the self-judgment, by the anxiety, by the grief, by the depression, by the anger, whatever else is there.

And I do think that it is during these times of heartbreak that we do need some external support, if it’s possible for us to get it, to help us to start to parse out what are these different clouds? What is this voice of self-judgment? What’s it saying to you? And so I can start to turn towards it and see like, “Oh yeah, that’s a cloud.” And I can start to be in connection with it and see what does this aspect of me need from me? And the same with my anger, or same with my grief, or my depression.

Even just coming into relationship with the parts and seeing them for what they are, seeing that we’re not them, that in and of itself starts to help the clouds part a little bit and the sun can start to peek out a little bit more. And it’s like once you get a little toehold into that sun, it starts to be able to create more and more and more, and it’s a gradual cumulative process.

 

TS: But take me into the experience that you were pointing to where you were talking about the part of you that was very judgmental of your experience. Okay, it’s a big storm cloud and it’s raining down on you and lightning and thunder and you know the sun’s there, and maybe it’s peeking through. How did you work with that storm cloud in some useful way through your IFS knowledge?

 

SAS: Well, once I became aware, okay, this isn’t the real me, this is an aspect of me, then I could turn toward it and I could ask it, “What are you afraid would happen if you didn’t judge me in this way, if you didn’t say these really harsh things to me?” And then I listen and it would say something like, “I’m afraid that if I didn’t judge you like this, that you’d be subjected to other people saying these things to you. And that would be far more devastating if this came from outside of you than from inside of you. So I’m trying to protect you from having more bad things happen to you. I’m trying to protect you just to keep yourself in, keep yourself reined in so you don’t draw a lot of attention and get this judgment from other people.”

And so then that opens up a sense of appreciation in me of like, “Oh, you’re actually trying to help me?” And then through there, through some more dialogue and connection and building trust with this part of me, then there’s a way that we can collaborate like, “Oh yeah, you don’t want other people to be saying mean things to me. I don’t want that either. And actually, you saying mean things to me isn’t helping. It’s actually making things worse for me. So if we both want the same thing, if we both want me to be doing well and to be fitting in the world, what’s a way that we can do that together that’s going to be more of a win-win?”

And then we can devise a new strategy to do this, and this is one of the ways that we then can start to transform our parts that can often hold us back or take us over. And these are the parts that bring us to therapy in the first place where those parts can start to become helpful allies for us so that we actually emerge from our challenges or from our heartbreak journey with a sense of deeper wholeness and deeper interconnectedness inside.

 

TS: You write how it’s possible that our pain can turn into powers that we have. And I wonder, could you explicitly say what powers you feel you have now that you didn’t have before this heartbreak passage?

 

SAS: The powers that I’m speaking of here, they’re more soul powers, and they’re not necessarily powers that we see or that are really applauded in everyday life. They’re powers of patience and persistence, perseverance, humility, compassion, faith. It’s like these powers, I felt were really forged in the fire of my pain and cultivated over those many years. They’re quiet powers. And like we hear in a lot of spiritual teachings, it’s like they are the real powers.

 

TS: That’s gorgeous, Sara. Thank you. You write about how the core language of heartbreak is grief, and yet our human nervous system is not designed to grieve alone. And yet, I think for a lot of us, we’re like, “Well, okay, who am I going to grieve with? How am I going to grieve with other people? That means I have to be incredibly vulnerable to share what I’m going through so that I can grieve with other people. I’d rather just grieve alone. Oh, but the human nervous system isn’t designed to grieve alone? I want to go be by myself with this terrible thing, even though I don’t really, but …”

 

SAS: And that’s one of the symptoms of living in a grief and heartbreak-illiterate world is that we don’t value grief and what it can offer us. We don’t understand it. And one of my intentions in writing this book was to help to educate about why grief is important.

Living in such a hyper-individualistic culture, most of us grieve alone on the bathroom floor or for me sometimes on the kitchen floor. And I would say even during those times, there’s a teaching that I bring in from Dr. Daniel Foor who wrote the book, Ancestral Medicine. And he talks about when we’re alone and we don’t have the community infrastructure to grieve like in a community grief ritual, for example.

Community grief rituals are something that were brought over by, particularly, Malidoma and Sobonfu Some, from their native Burkina Faso in West Africa. They brought grief rituals over to the US because they saw how ignorant we are about grief and how much we need this kind of work in our culture. And those grief rituals are designed for us to come together and move this big energy through us in community. But those are not easy to find necessarily.

And so this practice that Daniel Foor offered and which I also share in this book, is for us to call in an invisible circle of support when we’re in grief. Or we know that grief often comes in waves, so even when we start to feel a wave coming on, we can just come into our center and just have the intention to call around us those beings that are supportive to us. It could be friends, mentors, family members. They could be ancestors, they could be even the spirit guides that we know. Anything, anyone that would be supportive, we can just feel them circling around us.

So then we don’t need to hold it by ourselves. Then we can feel like we can just let go and let this wave have us. Because so much of what keeps us from feeling the grief is we’re afraid it’s going to obliterate us. We’re afraid it’s just going to completely break us apart, and we’re not going to be able to put ourselves back together again and function and put the kids to bed or go to work the next day or whatever it is. But if we can just, even in those times, just call in that invisible circle, that can help us to be blasted open and to not be torn apart by it in the process.

 

TS: When it comes to heartbreak literacy, there’s how do we work with our own initiations, but also how are we a support to other people? And you write beautifully about that, and I’d love to have you share with our listeners more when someone we know, maybe it’s a friend or someone in our family or a neighbor is going through something. What’s the most useful way to be helpful?

 

SAS: Well, first, one of the best gifts that we can give to other people and to the world right now is to be with our own heartbreak and pain wholeheartedly because that’s what’s going to prepare us to be able to be with others when they’re in their pain. There’s a resonance that people can feel from us when they’re in our presence and we have been through this portal that we’re talking about, this heartbreak portal.

And there’s that feeling of acceptance that I felt with my mentor of anything that I’m experiencing, anything that I’m going through, it feels like it’s okay with this person. They’re not scared of my grief. They’re not criticizing me for whatever I’m going through. They don’t have an agenda for me to be somewhere that I’m not. So this level of just, and even like we did at the very beginning of our conversation, this softening and tenderizing ourselves, moving our awareness into our hearts, and even just holding the intention, may I be the presence of love with this person?

So that’s the baseline, and then practically speaking, we can offer very specific support. So rather than having an open-ended question or an open-ended statement like, “Let me know if you need anything,” we can say, “I want to have you over for dinner this Saturday night at 6:00. You don’t need to bring anything, just bring yourself. I’d love to have you.”

Or, “I’m making a dinner reservation at this Italian restaurant in town, and this is the time, this is the date. I’d love to see you there.” Or, “I’d love to invite you for a walk.” Or, “Let me come over and take care of the kids for a couple of hours so you can have some time to yourself.” So having the courage to insert ourselves and be more bold with offering specific plans can just be a really big relief.

 

TS: As you spoke, Sara, about this wholehearted in-habitation of our own heartbreak, I thought, “We’ve stirred up a lot in this conversation, touched on a lot.” And I wonder if you could lead us with your presence, with your wholeheartedness available to all of us who are listening in a way that just for a few moments, we could touch our heartbreak and have the courage to do that, especially in the spirit of wanting to be human vessels available to other people.

 

SAS: Sure. So if it’s comfortable, you can close your eyes. And if that doesn’t feel okay for you for any reason, just a soft gaze away from the screen. And first, connect with your breath, inviting in without any force, even just a little bit of a fuller, deeper breath, and especially on the exhalations, inviting in a quality of relaxation. Feel the ground beneath you, whether that’s actually your feet on the ground, just feeling whatever you’re sitting on and its connection to the ground, feeling the sense of holding and support.

And then turning your attention toward your heart, let your inhale move over the front surface of your heart. Just notice what that feels like for you. And if you don’t feel anything, that’s okay too. There’s no wrong way to do this. And then sensing into something in your life, could be personal. It could be something that you know is happening with a loved one. It could be more collective, something that you know is happening in the world, just feeling into some sense of pain, sense of heartache about the way that things are unfolding for you, for another person, for our planet, for a large population of people. Just choosing one area, one heartache to tune into right now.

And you don’t need to feel the entirety of it, just opening even just one little corner of that. And as you do, just continuing with that breath over the front surface of your heart, letting that breath touch even that little corner, that little sliver of that heartache. And with the inhale, just also having this sense of inviting it in with all the resistance or with any resistance that’s present, whatever your experience of it is, just breathing it in and acknowledging that this is here and that you’re here with it.

And then just acknowledging this heartache, just acknowledging its space in your heart. You can even tuck it into a little safe space there where you know where it is and you know that you can return to it when and as you’re ready to. And you know that your willingness to do this actually makes you and your heart more available to yourself and to others. And again, feeling the ground beneath you, feeling your breath and making your way back into our space together as you’re ready.

 

TS: Thank you. I just have one final topic I’d like to talk about, Sara, and this is for someone who says, “There’s this heartbreak that happened a while ago. I feel like I’ve worked through a lot of the raw pain of it, but somehow I just can’t let it go. I can’t really move beyond it. It’s always there. It’s there like a ball and chain or something. I know I’m carrying it around with me even though it was so long ago.”

And one of the sections in Handbook for the Heartbroken is about rituals and rituals we can do. And I wonder if you might have a suggestion for someone who’s in the situation I’m describing of a ritual that they could do and how you would go about constructing something like that if they really wanted a deeper letting go in their life of this heartbreak event.

 

SAS: Sure. Actually, the ritual that comes to mind is not one that I included in the book, but it’s one that I’ve learned of since the book came out. And I first learned of this through someone who’s controversial right now, Dr. Andrew Huberman. I’ve done this ritual and I found it to be really powerful. He didn’t create it, but he talked about it on his podcast. And there’s been scientific studies done, the efficacy of this, where you do four 15 minute journaling sessions.

So in this instance that you’re talking about, Tami, you take the experience that you feel like is not processed, that you’re still carrying around with you at some level and you’re not quite sure how to access it. You set your timer on your phone or wherever, sit down at your journal and just start writing, just stream of consciousness and see where it takes you. And then at the end of those 15 minutes, stop. And then you can either start again right away, or you can do this spaced out over the day or a longer period of time.

And through this full one hour of writing, it starts to take you into little nooks and crannies and in directions that you would not normally go in, that you wouldn’t even necessarily think about. And you can emerge from the other side of that feeling a deeper level of settled-ness with whatever the experience was.

And then if you wanted more of a ritualistic element to it, a lot of times we bring actually the elements into a ritual. So you could burn the paper. You could rip it up and burn it. You could rip it up and bury it. You could send it out into a body of water, an ocean or a lake or a river. You could again, tear it into little pieces and set it off into the wind, but you could have some more ritualistic way of releasing it after you write that all down.

 

TS: Thank you. Sara, I was really moved when I asked you how the pain turned into powers in your life, and you shared about the spiritual gifts, if you will, of patience and humility. And I thought to myself, “So there Sara was, she was rocking it in her career. She was writing these books and leading all of these women worldwide on all these terrific retreats and various kinds. And then she went through this cascade of terrible events, a hellish series of events, and now she’s different. She’s different.”

And I thought to myself, “So is her ego going to get all built up again now she’s going to get a lot of acclaim for her new work on heartbreak and humility and patience?” And I guess I’m just curious how you experience yourself structurally like, “Oh, that could never happen again,” or, “That might happen again,” or I don’t know, “I’ve just been forever changed by what I went through.”

 

SAS: I love that question. I don’t feel like there’s any going back. And one of the mentors that I worked with, she gave me a really powerful framework that I’d never heard of before, the framework of the midlife initiation. And she talks about, there’s different stages along the midlife initiation. The midlife initiation is an initiation of the soul. So other soul initiations are like birth and death and elderhood, but midlife initiation is a big one. It usually happens somewhere between 35 and 45.

So I was just right smack in the middle of my midlife initiation because at some level, I felt like what I was going through was a soul process. It was beyond personal understanding or personality. But one of the big functions of the midlife initiation is to shed the false personality. And each of us in our false personality has a core fear pattern, or in IFS we’d say a protective pattern. And mine was arrogance. That was a core way that I protected myself.

Now, there are times when that comes up occasionally, but now I can see it. So going back to that sun and the clouds analogy, I can see, okay, yeah, there’s the arrogant part who’s trying to protect me, and then I can even just have a breath or an awareness and it can step back. But the midlife initiation is about really shedding the false personality so that who we truly are, this sun, this essence can shine.

And so I do feel completely reorganized. I mean, that is the greatest gift of this experience is I feel like I was fully given to myself. And that doesn’t mean I don’t have challenges. It doesn’t mean that I don’t have stuff that comes up. I do. We’re human and I’m human. That’s part of the process. But there’s just a much deeper wholeness and at-home-ness in myself that’s available for me to come back to.

 

TS: I’ve been speaking with Sara Avant Stover. She’s the author of the book, Handbook for the Heartbroken: A Woman’s Path from Devastation to Rebirth. Thank you so much, Sara. Thank you for taking us right into the heart of the heart. Thank you.

 

SAS: Thank you for the questions that helped to lead us there.

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