From Heartache to Happiness

One: Awareness and Intention “The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.” Helen Keller Adversity is Your Ally We didn’t like the way we were feeling. We had become aware of the numbness in our lives. The feeling, or lack of feeling, had become all too pervasive. Just one foot in front of the other, looking down, not seeing ahead: the next step, the next thing to do. We were living on automatic pilot. This was just a shell of existence: pretending to be alive. We had been to a lot of support groups and found a lot of programs that didn’t work for us. We set upon a journey to find a way to heal our own heartache, to find the tools that worked to assist us in moving through all of our loss experiences and issues. What we found was light years beyond what we could have ever imagined. We found a life filled with more joy, wonder and loving then we could have ever dreamed. Not only did we heal the most present heartache, we discovered other issues that we were totally unaware of. They were holding us back in our relationships with others and ourselves. In our search, both internally and in the physical world, we found what worked for us and began to share our work with others. Every experience of loss and heartache is unique as is each person’s responses and reactions. We have outlined the tools and techniques that worked for us as we navigated through our own personal heartaches. These are the exact same tools and techniques we are using today with our coaching clients. They are effective if you do the work from the inside out. We are not telling you what is true, only what we have found helpful. We encourage you to commit fully to experiencing the exercises in this book. Use what works for you and let go of the rest. We suggest that you set aside those things that don’t seem to be a “fit” for you at this time and try them on later. What doesn’t work for you today may make more sense at another time or when you look at it from a different perspective. Throughout this book we invite you to examine your life and your experiences with those you love, those that you may now hold as less than loved ones and most importantly, with yourself. In particular, we will be identifying those people and events that hold the most meaning, have the deepest feelings and with whom we continue to invest energy, both loving and painful. We will seek to find the lessons, opportunities and blessings in these experiences, identifying and releasing ourselves from the judgments we have made and coming to a place of gratitude for the learning and loving that these people have made in our lives. Loving is the Purpose We have learned that the healing of all issues must be cleared on all four levels of existence: physical, mental, emotional and spiritual. Achieving balance on all four of these levels is essential. They are not separate entities, but interrelated parts of the whole person. The experiences we have held as negative are not a mistake or a punishment; they are actually an integral part of the life journey. Our issues are not healed at the same level as they were created. Healing occurs only when we are able to view them from a higher and more loving perspective. We might use the words Spirit, God, or Christ Consciousness interchangeably. In this book we use the phrase Spiritual Source. The specific words are not as important as you finding the meaning in them. If you are uncomfortable with the words we use please feel free to substitute words that work for you. The spiritual wound can be one of the most difficult to work with. Many people we have worked with have had a great amount of anger at Spirit for the loss they were suffering. This wound and anger further exacerbates the feelings of separation and abandonment in our lives. We may feel we are all alone, that we have to do it all ourselves, and yet our feelings of abandonment may not allow us to move forward. These feelings feed upon themselves and become our core issues. It is probably not productive to work with these fundamental issues directly in the beginning, but the good news is that as we work our process on all of our other issues, these feelings will begin to loosen. Take heart, be gentle with yourself. If a child skinned their knee you wouldn’t poke the wound with your finger would you? You would kiss it and apply a generous amount of loving to it. We suggest that you do the same with yourself, too. This book is about moving into loving as opposed to supporting the feelings of heartache and loss. We will fully support you moving through your present heartache as a necessary journey to move into a life filled with more joy, peace, connection and loving.   Guidelines for Your Journey “This we know: All things are connected like the blood which unites one family. All things are connected. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth. Man did not weave the web of life. He is merely a strand of it. Whatever he does to the web he does to himself.” Chief Seattle