About the Book
In a heartbreak-illiterate world, Handbook for the Heartbroken offers solace and support through personal and collective losses of all kinds-including the end of a relationship or a job, death of a loved one, a natural disaster, infertility, abortion, a financial crisis, or any other form of loss.
Heartbreak sends us reeling-we can feel alone and adrift. After her own experience of serial heartbreaks over the span of five years, Sara Avant Stover felt deeply impacted by our culture's dysfunctional relationship with loss-especially for women. "We're encouraged at every turn to hurry up and get on with it," she says. "But by trying to power through these messier seasons of life, we're denying ourselves the very answers to our healing and growth."
With Handbook for the Heartbroken, Sara offers the grounded guidance she needed during her own falls from grace to help you navigate loss and turmoil. Blending her expertise in Internal Family Systems and various wisdom traditions, she examines the three main phases of heartbreak: devastation, transformation, and rebirth. With each phase, she shares gentle lessons and supportive practices for anyone experiencing the unthinkable, including:
. An exploration of nuanced emotions associated with heartbreak and grief-ranging from early stages of shock, anger, and pain to healing spaces of forgiveness and restoring trust
. Relevant and relatable stories from the author and her clients, creating a road map for your unique healing journey
. Practices and journal prompts to create a safe container to digest your experiences of heartbreak, both past and present, more fully
. An invitation for finding a way forward both as individuals and as members of a community to draw on support of trusted friends and family
"Heartbreak is an inevitable part of everyone's life journey," says Sara. "It's by returning to our essential qualities like patience, openheartedness, and trust that we can truly heal." Handbook for the Heartbroken can be your trustworthy friend through the hardest seasons of life, helping you embrace change and "become a fully wise, mature, integrated human being."
About the Author :
Sara Avant Stover is a certified Internal Family Systems practitioner, author of The Way of the Happy Woman and The Book of SHE, and teacher and mentor of women's spirituality and entrepreneurship. Her work-integrating Buddhism, embodiment, and psychology-has uplifted the lives of countless women worldwide. She has taught at Kripalu, 1440 Multiversity, and Shambhala Mountain Center and has been featured in Yoga Journal, the Huffington Post, Newsweek, Natural Health, and more.
For more, visit saraavantstover.com.
Review :
"Handbook for the Heartbroken is a lighthouse of a book, offering solace and guidance to women navigating the labyrinth of heartache. A loving companion on our way, Sara Avant Stover reminds us through her years of experience of the gentle, steady power of self-compassion. A heartfelt and essential guide for every woman's journey toward wholeness and resilience." --Elena Brower, author of Practice You and Softening Time
"For anyone experiencing heartbreak, past, present, or future (all of us!), Sara Avant Stover's wise and comforting teachings will wrap you in a warm blanket of understanding and truly helpful practices that bring relief. Drink the steaming cup of tea she offers us, through the incredibly poignant and insightful stories of her own healing and those of her students. I can't imagine a better companion through grief and devastation than this book." --Kaira Jewel Lingo, author of We Were Made for These Times, coauthor of Healing Our Way Home
"Handbook for the Heartbroken is an insightful guide for women navigating the treacherous waters of all types of loss and falls from grace. Sara Avant Stover offers practical tools and healing strategies, drawing from both personal experience and extensive research. This book is a must-read for anyone seeking solace and rebirth after a challenging season of life." --Sara Gottfried, MD, New York Times bestselling author of Women, Food, and Hormones
"Recognizing the fullness and complexity of who we each are and holding this fullness in the larger container of ritual, these are essential skills if we're to navigate the rupture, ordeals, and sorrow that life brings. Sara Avant Stover's work is a kind, humble, and well-crafted guidebook for just this type of navigation through the depths." --Daniel Foor, PhD, author of Ancestral Medicine
"A healing balm for the heart, Handbook for the Heartbroken is a guide into the portals of awakening, rebirth, and wholeness. In a culture where we are often shamed for our suffering, this book is a light on the path towards acceptance and trust. Thank you Sara, for this much-needed gift to the world." --Tracee Stanley, author of Radiant Rest and The Luminous Self
"In this handbook for holding and healing through life's hardships, alongside insightful contemplations and relevant practices, Sara Avant Stover lovingly offers her own and other's experiential heartaches as a much needed feminine circle of support during our own times of despair." --Sarah Powers, author of Insight Yoga and Lit From Within
"Handbook for the Heartbroken is a soulful companion that tenderly holds the hands of women as they traverse the dark valleys of their lives. With compassion and depth, Sara Avant Stover guides us to unearth the treasures hidden within our pain, leading us to become more graceful, whole human beings along the way. This is a gift to women seeking solace and a deeper connection to their own inner wisdom." --Miranda Macpherson, author of The Way of Grace
"Sara Avant Stover has written a wise, grounded, and thorough roadmap and companion for women, helping us to move through the world with self-compassion and grace, recognizing that our experience is important, that our losses must be tended, and that we are not alone on this feminine path. Handbook for the Heartbroken is a life preserver in a storm." --Kimberly Ann Johnson, author of Call of the Wild, The Fourth Trimester, and Reclaiming the Feminine
"This book is like a dear friend accompanying us in our darkest hours, full of permission, wisdom, and care. Sara Avant Stover's candor and generosity about her own grief opens the door for us to compassionately navigate our own. She writes, 'Grief is trying to break your heart open. It's trying to soften you.' This book helps us do that, leaving us more loving and more whole." --Heidi Rose Robbins, author of Everyday Radiance
"This handbook is an elegantly and truthfully written guide to heartbreak and beyond. The book itself soothes the heart." --Jennifer Freed, PhD, author of A Map to Your Soul and Use Your Planets Wisely
"Life is guaranteed to bring all of us to our knees at some point; this is the book to read when you're on the floor. This is a gift of a book, one that is destined to be a much-loved resource for all women when life falls apart. Whether it's the devastation of romantic betrayal and relationship breakdown, the lifelong living loss of abortion, failed infertility treatments and unchosen childlessness, chronic illness and loneliness, the terror and shame of business failure, homelessness, redundancy, financial meltdown and bankruptcy, Sara Avant Stover has been there--and survived. Presented as a totally relatable mixture of vulnerable autobiography, practical guidance, and the stories of other women Sara has worked with, it is refreshingly free of the kind of inspirational bullshit that ignores the complex, intersectional, structural realities of so many women's lives. This is a candid, helpful, honest, and affirming handbook." --Jody Day, founder of Gateway Women, author of Living the Life Unexpected
"This world will break your heart--the question is what will you do with it? How refreshing to read Sara Avant Stover's Handbook for the Heartbroken and have a fierce, tender, and skilled companion for the deep walk through heartbreak who knows how to make heart medicine on this journey to live on and heal well. And though the stories Stover shares are personal, each one echoes the greater wounds and heartbreak of the feminine that we each must heal in order for her to rise from the ashes of a patriarchal time and reembody her beautiful truth." --Tami Lynn Kent, author of Wild Feminine
"In these times of upheaval and uncertainty, we do not need more preachy books by self-proclaimed experts. What we need is vulnerability. Beauty. Luminous examples of what it looks like to walk through the wreckage with your heart open, your mind curious, your soul attuned. We need fearless storytellers like Sara Avant Stover. This book is generous and generative." --Mirabai Starr, author of Caravan of No Despair and Wild Mercy
"Intimate descriptions of pain and heartbreak illuminate this work further, alongside clarifying assertions that grief is only part of a human life. Journaling prompts and guided meditations are included to help people explore their feelings--and, when they're ready, act in order to heal. Handbook for the Heartbroken is a compassionate self-help guide to help women survive heartbreak--and thrive." - Foreword Reviews
