Category — wisdom of a broken heart

I like! Do you? (Subtitle still under discussion.)

This is how Simon & Schuster will describe my new book in their catalog. It includes the title, subtitle, brief description, and some very nice quotes to give me credibility and make me sound cool.

Next step is to submit the manuscript (Oct 15) and then begin revisions based on editor’s comments and vision, which I look forward to very much. Then at some point, cover ideas will start floating around, probably in early 2009.

Nobody (meaning me, my agent, my editor at S&S) really loves the subtitle. I’m thinking of something more along the lines of “Discovering the True Path to Love” because it points to the wisdom journey that you take when your heart is broken and is less prescriptive. That said, people definitely want to know why it hurts and how to make it stop. Most of all, I think when your heart is broken, you want to know that you’re going to be okay. You will love again. You will stop desiring this particular person or mourning the relationship. But how to say that in a catchy (but not cutesy) subtitle? I open the floor to suggestions!!

The Wisdom of a Broken Heart
Why It Hurts So Much and How to Make It Stop

The New York Times bestselling author of The Hard Questions and relationship columnist for Body & Soul looks at the hardest part of a relationship—heartbreak—and provides a practical, steadying, compassionate plan for emerging a stronger, braver, spiritually transformed person.

“The heart that is broken has been broken open,” writes Susan Piver. “When my heart was broken, it changed my life…From this most painful experience came the ability to find and appreciate lasting love.” The anguish and disappointment of a broken heart is devastating and overwhelming, but as Susan Piver reveals in The Wisdom of a Broken Heart, it can also create an opportunity for genuine spiritual transformation, paradoxically leaving one both stronger and softer—and capable of loving even more deeply than before.

Filled with on-the-spot practices, exercises, funny stories (often drawn from her own experience), poems, meditations, and down-to-earth, practical advice on how to cope with day-to-day miseries, The Wisdom of a Broken Heart offers a priceless prescription of solace and encouragement, wisdom and humor. Like an infinitely patient, trusted friend, it tells its readers in a thousand different ways the most important thing to remember and the easiest to forget: “You’re going to be okay.”

Praise for Susan Piver:
“Susan Piver is a deeply intuitive and innovative thinker. She has both tenderness and acuity regarding what concerns us. I could not recommend her more highly.”
—Julia Cameron, author of The Artist’s Way

“Susan Piver shows us how to create a fearless life.”
— Andrew Weil, M.D., author of Healthy Aging

Susan Piver’s bestselling books include The Hard Questions: 100 Essential Questions to Ask Before You Say ‘I Do,’ and How Not to Be Afraid of Your Own Life. A graduate of a Buddhist seminary, she writes the relationships column for Body & Soulmagazine and is a frequent guest on network television, including The Oprah Winfrey Show, Today, and The Tyra Banks Show.

My friend Sarah ingeniously outlines them this way. Check out her blog for more such Sarah-ness.

Here are the phases as I see it…

1) The Break-up/Emotional Thrombosis/International Freak-out
Whatever, that’s like a month to 6 weeks of hell, panic, devastation. All you have to do is survive and lean on your friends and family as much as possible. I just felt like the world had kicked me out and I was all alone in Queens.  Anyone willing to listen was truly a lifeboat for me.

2) Mourning
So now you’re 2 months in and something has to motivate you to not react so hard to the outside world and what it’s throwing at you.  Instead you do the opposite and drop inside of yourself to look for the answers.  This is around the time I read your blog.  It gave me that bit of altitude I needed to be like “Oh sad?  Ok, I can do sad.  I hate it, but I can do it.”  But the key for me was really investigating the sadness.  I was finally seeing the need to unbundle all of the stories and feelings, take what was valuable and release what wasn’t.  That seemed freaking impossible, but that’s where meditation came in.  I wasn’t doing Metta yet, but I do think I did my own weird versions.  So much of the journaling was just notes to myself to freaking hang in there.  I made a decision that whenever one of my cry-fests was about to come up, I wouldn’t push it down or just start in one of my re-run stories about what happened with us.  I would drop whatever I was doing, get in my bed and cry my face off until it passed.  I even left meetings at work to lay on my office floor for a few minutes and cry it out.  Gosh, you basically have to develop a split personality for a bit to pull yourself through.  Journaling is interesting here and I wonder if you’re right about the writer thing. Although I never consider it “Writing”.  It was basically heart nonsense that needed some air.  But I do know people who are opposed to journaling when a shrink has suggested it.  It’s actually troubling for them.  I think you should definitely recommend it, but make clear that it in no way needs to be valid “writing”.  It should be there purely as a friend.

3) Take your heartbreak on the road. 4-6 months in and ongoing;-)
I think you eventually have to leave the cocoon you built for yourself, while being mindful that you’re in a fragile place.  Your heart is sort of brand new if you’ve done the work right.  I was at meditation classes and getting involved in charities.  I went out on a date, (mehhh), but I went!  Oh, I did your writers retreat.  I started my blog. Got a trainer.  It was a hard time, but this year has been the most in-touch with myself that I have ever been.  I would have preferred to learn the lessons in a far less painful way, but what are you going to do. I’m reading this freaking awesome book, “The Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao”.  The first line from one of the chapters is so perfect I can’t stand it, “It’s never the changes we want that change everything”  Pfff, word.  Welcome to break-ups;-)

Oh!  remember when you sent me an email months ago about how to deal with my ex-boyfriend flare-ups.  I was feeling so tight and angry, meditating felt impossible.  You recommend that instead of focusing on the in and out, turn my attention to the actual feeling over and over.  Let it burn itself up.  That was soooo helpful Susan.  I used that a lot to move in to my stage 3.

Anyway, this is way too much.  But thank you for support and kind words.  I think “groundless” is the word of choice when it comes to post break-up experiences. Somedays I feel all kinds of freedom and hope. The other days the groundlessness is just scary.  But I really believe there is no other way. If I thought telling him off would work, believe me, I would have done it;-)

Keep the faith!

For my new book, “The Wisdom of a Broken Heart,” I’m compiling a list of things you could do when you think you’re about to lose it. Meant for those super acute moments when you basically can’t even remember your own name and you just need someone to give you a task.

It’s divided into three categories:

Distract it.

Indulge it.

Fight it.

What would you add?

Checklist: Thinks to Do When You’re About to Lose It
A semi-serious list of things you could do instead of drunk-dialing, head-shaving, burning things down, or devouring entire cakes at one sitting. I can personally attest to the vibility of each of these items to take my mind off of what ails me. Even if it’s only for a few minutes. Refer to this list when you are desperate for something, anything to do to distract, indulge, or fight against your sorrow.

Distract it
•    Dump every single item of clothing you own on the floor and divide into two piles: things that make you feel attractive and things that don’t. Take the latter pile to Goodwill.

•    Organize your Netflix Queue

•    Go to Amazon.com, Goodreads.com, or Shelfari.com and review all the relationship books you’ve ever read; begin dialogue with likeminded readers. Make your suggested reading list for others who are going through heartbreak.

•    Organize your iPod playlists

•    Identify 5-7 DVDs that do not make you cry. Could be funny movies or just absorbing ones. Keep this stack handy and when you feel yourself start to hyperventilate, pop one in the player.

My list:
40-Year Old Virgin
Anchorman
All About Eve
Flight of the Conchords (HBO; OK, this is the funniest thing I have EVER seen. You’ll even get a crush on them, which is great distraction from a broken heart.)
Intolerable Cruelty
Palm Beach Story
The Wire (HBO; Any season)
The Women (original version)

I queried friends and these were on their lists:
Big Lebowski
Bowfinger
Coming to America
Dodgeball
Love, Actually
Mulan
Office Space
Princess Bride
Raising Arizona

•    Popular lore (now debunked) has it that Eskimos have countless names for snow, perhaps because snow is what they live in. Heartbroken folks live in a world of tears. Make up names for different kinds of crying. To get you started, here are a few kinds of crying that should have their own names:

Dry Heave tears: Sobbing without tears
Frustrated tears: When you feel like crying, but you can’t—no tears come out
Geyser tears: Crying that overtakes you out of the blue
Night Tears: Crying in your sleep
Surprising tears: You don’t even know you’re crying
Talking tears: talking and crying at the same time

•    If you haven’t already, start following people on Twitter. I love Twitter. Someone coined a phrase to describe it: “ambient intimacy” and that is just right. Twitter is an online instant message service with the world. You find people and start “following” them. Millions of people are chatting with each other 24/7—but only in 140 character increments which is what Twitter limits you to, so no one can get overly verbose. It’s like a cocktail party that’s always going on and it enables you to get and give some human contact whenever you want. And disappear when you want. To get started, follow me: twitter.com/spiver.

Indulge it
•    Identify 5-7 DVDs that do make you cry. I’m not talking about those dark, gloomy movies that just make you depressed—I’m talking about the ones that make you bawl like a baby. Sometimes it’s a comedy and sometimes it’s be Bambi. For example, the television show “What Not to Wear” always makes me cry even though it’s a fashion reality show. (Something about seeing the swan revealed at the end…) Keep this stack handy and when you just need to let it all out, pop one in the player and sob with dignity.

My list:
A Beautiful Mind
Dark Victory
Field of Dreams
Gladiator
The Last Samurai
Stranger Than Fiction (when Will Ferrell sings “Whole Wide World)
Anything where a dog dies

I queried friends on Twitter and these were on their lists:
Bambi
Big Fish
Dead Poets Society
E.T.
Fiddler on the Roof
Grave of the Fireflies
The Green Mile
Hotel Rwanda
I Am Sam
Life is Beautiful
The Lion King
The Little Mermaid
Million Dollar Baby
The Notebook
Philadelphia
Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants
Steel Magnolias
Sweet November
Titanic
Whale Rider

•    Make a sob-sister playlist and listen to it. Here are my top 10 songs for when I want to get all worked up:
Change Gonna Come (Sam Cooke)
Dark End of the Street (James Carr)
I Can’t Stand the Rain (Ann Peebles)
I Can’t Stop Loving You (Freddy Fender)
I’ve Been Loving You Too Long (Otis Redding)
There is an End (The Greenhornes & Holly Golightly)
What Becomes of the Broken Hearted? (Jimmy Ruffin)
When I Get Like This (Five Royales)
Whole Wide World (Wreckless Eric)
Your Precious Love (Jerry Butler)

Fight it
•    For god’s sake, go to the gym.

•    Take on an exercise regime you think you can’t do: If you’re a yogini, try a 45-minute walk/run instead. If you’re a runner, go to a yoga class. If you always take Spinning, try strength training. If you don’t do anything, do anything.

•    Walk. Walk. Walk. Drop everything and take a walk when you feel yourself about to collapse. You can walk in the morning or you can walk at night. (If you don’t live in a scary neighborhood.) You can take a break from your desk and walk around the block.  You can walk in the summer and you can walk in the winter. There’s something incredibly cozy and fun about piling on coats, scarves, and hats and taking yourself for a walk when normal people would stay inside (when it’s raining or snowing, for example). You are not a normal person right now. Go with it.

•    Help a stranger. This may be the most time-worn suggestion of all time, but who cares. The very second you help someone in need, something completely magical happens. All the energy that you had been devoting to propping yourself up turns from half-assed to raging, a force to be reckoned with—when it’s aimed at someone else. Self-hatred, depression, and insecurity disappear when you put yourself in the service of another. Everything you wish you could do for yourself—take your mind off of it, recover your dignity, feel good about yourself, become energized—just happens. You can help someone by:

Giving them money: do some research and donate to a charity. Go a little out of your comfort zone. If you could afford $10, give $15. If you could afford $500, give $750. And so on.

Volunteer: to read to people in the hospital, help out at an animal shelter, for a politician you admire (I think there may be one or two left), or at your church. One of the best tools I ever found for working with my depression was to volunteer at a crisis center. Talking to others in crisis balanced me out for some reason. The best kind is when you get right up in there with people (or animals) who are in actual pain, whether physical or emotional. Let their difficulty into your heart. You’ll know what to do
next. (And the volunteer agency will train you, too.)

Calling them: you can also help people you already know. Call a friend or family member who is going through some difficulty. Don’t talk about yourself. Keep the focus of the conversation on them.

How Can I Heal a Broken Heart?

For Beliefnet

Jimmy Ruffin

While writing my book on heartbreak (”The Wisdom of a Broken Heart,” due out in September ‘09), I’ve turned again and again to that time honored source of knowledge and solace: music.

Here are the lyrics to my current all-time fave. It is just so wrenching and poetic. Grab a kleenex and enjoy.

WHAT BECOMES OF THE BROKEN HEARTED

Songwriters: James Dean/Paul Riser/William Weatherspoon

As I walk this land of broken dreams
I have visions of many things
But happiness is just an illusion
Filled with sadness and confusion

What becomes of the broken hearted
Who had love, that’s now departed
I know I’ve got to find
Some kind of peace of mind, maybe

The roots of love grow all around
But for me they come a tumblin’ down
Every day heartaches grow a little stronger
I can’t stand this pain much longer

I walk in shadows searching for light
Cold and alone, no comfort in sight
Hoping and praying for someone to care
Always moving and going nowhere

What becomes of the broken hearted
Who had love, that’s now departed
I know I’ve got to find
Some kind of peace of mind, help me

I’m searching though I don’t succeed
But someone look, there’s a growing need
All is lost, there’s no place for beginning
All that’s left is an unhappy ending

Now what becomes of the broken-hearted
Who had love, that’s now departed
I know I’ve got to find
Some kind of peace of mind

I’ll be searching everywhere
Just to find someone to care
I’ll be looking everyday
I know I’m gonna find a way

Nothing’s gonna stop me now
I’ll find a way somehow
I’ll be searching everywhere

So this is what I’ve ended up with, with around 30 hours to go before returning home after one month away.

48,366 words and many short chapters. Laid out as follows:

“The Wisdom of a Broken Heart”

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

Part One: Relax
Chapter One: How the Light Gets In
Chapter Two: Depression vs. Sadness
Chapter Three: Nothing Happens
Chapter Four: It is a Dark Night
Chapter Five: Making Friends with Heartbreak
Chapter Six: Yes, You Have Lost Your Mind (But it’s Okay.)
Chapter Seven: How to Meditate
Chapter Eight: If You Accept Pain, It Cannot Hurt You
Chapter Nine: Sex Might Help
Chapter Ten: Have Faith

Part Two: See Where You Are
Chapter Eleven: Of the Four Responses, One is Helpful
Chapter Twelve: Act Like a Queen
Chapter Thirteen: Give Your Demons a Dinner Party
Chapter Fourteen: Expect Allies
Chapter Fifteen: Become Wrathful
Chapter Sixteen: Intensify to Let Go
Chapter Seventeen: Trump This
Chapter Eighteen: Mirrors
Chapter Nineteen: “I Forgive You”
Chapter Twenty: Really Unhelpful Things
Chapter Twenty-One: Really Untrue Things
Chapter Twenty-Two: Intimacy is Always There

Part Three: Be Where You Are
Chapter Twenty-Three: A Luminous Journey
Chapter Twenty-Four: Authenticity
Chapter Twenty-Five: The Meaning of Love
Chapter Twenty-Six: One Sorry-Ass Bodhisattva
Chapter Twenty-Seven: Tears and the Bodhisattva
Chapter Twenty-Eight: The Practice of Loving Kindness
Chapter Twenty-Nine: Extending Loving Kindness to the One who Broke Your Heart
Chapter Thirty: Turning Off the Projector
Chapter Thirty-One: The Importance of Sadness

Part Four: Broken Hearted to Wholehearted, A X-Day Program

Afterword

Goodbye, Colorado! Thank you. I love you.

Only four more days until I go home.

I’m at Shambhala Mountain Center right now, where I’ve been for the past few days. I’m sitting in my very favorite room in the Shambhala Lodge–#308—watching and listening to the thunder and lightning and the sound of rain.

Of course it’s nowhere near as luxurious as where I was house sitting, but in some ways it’s even better because when I’m here, I’m in the kingdom of Shambhala. That is what it feels like. There are several hundred people on the land right now and they’re all here to practice, to look at their own minds. It’s quite intense and at the same time, nothing is going on. I have my writing desk set up just below the window (as you can see) and it’s just wonderful to sit here and work and occasionally see someone walking by. Where I was house sitting, I had the marvelous sensation of being in a cloud aerie. Looking out the windows, I saw an enormous landscape. Here, there is an equally wonderful feeling of being on the earth. It feels so good.

I’ve been having a great writing experience here. I’ve been waking quite early, around 5:30, getting a cup of tea, and getting right to work. My goal is to write 2000 words per day and in the last few days, I’ve been done by around 8:30! That’s it. Then there is the whole day ahead of me. I am very hopeful that I’m going to meet my goal of going home with 50,000 words towards my new book, since as of this morning, I’m up to just under 45,000. It’s due in October. If I can complete the manuscript by the end of August and then have all of September to simply think carefully about everything, that will be a miracle, a joy, a tremendous blessing. Not to mention a first. In the past, I’ve been writing the book basically up until the final fedex delivery on the final day before it’s due. NOT fun.

So much of my time is spent thinking of my teacher, Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, and of his father, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, who is the person who entered me into the dharma in the first place, through his books. I think about Trungpa Rinpoche all the time. I often wonder what he would tell me about my practice, if he would think I was a good student or not. I usually weigh in on the “not” side. In any case, in writing “The Wisdom of a Broken Heart,” it is clear to me that this book is my attempt to meet the mind of Trungpa Rinpoche. I hardly dare admit that, but nonetheless it’s true. His teachings on warriorship, tenderness, loneliness, and sadness, are so completely beautiful and perfect that I feel like I must have been born with them already in my heart. They touch me, not in the way of exciting new information, but more like someone waking you up from a dream and reminding you of where you really (already) are. There is no possible way to express gratitude to him, or to Sakyong Mipham for teaching me how to know my own mind, moment to moment. Well, there is one way. I could become completely enlightened. That would probably be the only way to say thank you.

On the land here at Shambhala Mountain Center is the Great Stupa of Dharmakaya, built to commemorate and preserve the spirit of Chogyam Trungpa. It is unbelievably beautiful and ornate.

Inside is a 25’ statue of the Buddha.

To get to the Stupa, you walk along a path that leads through the most gentle and wonderful little aspen grove, with a rock bench. When I’m back in Boston and wishing I could calm down, I think of this bench.To me it’s the best seat in the world.

I love the aspen grove. Aspens always look like they’re at a cocktail party.

So today I practiced in the Stupa and all I can say is, it’s the best place in the world to practice. And sitting outside it, I look out on my very favorite view in the world. Shambhala Mountain Center is home to many personal superlatives as you can see.

Shambhala has its own anthem, written by Trungpa Rinpoche and, here comes another superlative, it is my favorite song ever. Whenever it’s sung, there is always, always one line that make me cry, even though, every single time, I swear that it won’t.

Rejoice! The Great Eastern Sun arises!

There is so much goodness in this world. You are made of it and so am I. All troubles are workable. Raw and tender beauty is palpable in each moment. This is what is meant by Great Eastern Sun. Rejoice!

Am in a bit of a no man’s land regarding the next book I want to write. I want to write about heartbreak from this perspective: there is wisdom in it. The good news and the bad news is that it basically destroys self-view. You are no longer able to see yourself or your life in the same terms; the slate is wiped clean and even though it doesn’t feel very good, there is extraordinary wisdom in this not knowing. A broken heart is like the world’s swiftest BS meter. Whatever is without genuine value–stale friendships, responsibilities that don’t align with your deeper intentions, empty aspirations–simply drops away. You no longer have the stomach for these things, or at least you see them for what they are. You see what everyone and everything in your life is actually made of. You are able to see clearly.

In the Shambhala Buddhist lineage, we talk a lot about spiritual warriorship. What is a warrior? One who is tough enough never to feel pain, never become intimidated? No. That is actually thought of as stupidity. A real warrior embraces clear seeing. She has the intelligence to look directly into her pain and to build from it deeper wisdom. If you can do this, if you can sit night after night with your broken heart, tasting it, feeling it, tolerating it in order to learn its lessons, you deserve to wear the badge of extreme courage. This is a warrior. I bow to you.

I want to write this book so much. I hope my publisher will like it. We shall see.

“So each time the losses and deceptions of life teach us about impermanence, they bring us closer to the truth. When you fall from a great height, there is only one possible place to land: on the ground; the ground of truth. And if you have the understanding that comes from spiritual practice, then falling is in no way a disaster but the discovery of an inner refuge..

Difficulties and obstacles, if properly understood and used, can often turn out to be an unexpected source of strength. In the biographies of the masters, you will often find that had they not faced difficulties and obstacles, they would not have discovered the strength they needed to rise above them. This was true, for example, of Gesar, the great warrior king of Tibet, whose escapades form the greatest epic of Tibetan literature. Gesar means “indomitable,” someone who can never be put down. From the moment Gesar was born, his evil uncle Trotung tried all kinds of means to kill him. But with each attempt Gesar only grew stronger and stronger. It was thanks to Trotung’s efforts, in fact, that Gesar was to become so great. This gave rise to a Tibetan proverb: “Trotung tro ma tung na, Gesar ge mi sar,” which means that if Trotung had not been so malicious and scheming, Gesar could never have risen so high.

For the Tibetans Gesar is not only a martial warrior but also a spiritual one. To be a spiritual warrior means to develop a special kind of courage, one that is innately intelligent, gentle, and fearless. Spiritual warriors can still be frightened, but even so they are courageous enough to taste suffering, to relate clearly to their fundamental fear, and to draw out without evasion the lessons from difficulties. As Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche tells us, becoming a warrior means that “we can trade our small-minded struggle for security for a much vaster vision, one of fearlessness, openness, and genuine heroism…” To enter the transforming field of that much vaster vision is to learn how to be at home in change, and how to make impermanence our friend.

~From The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying
by Sogyal Rinpoche

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