The Wisdom of a Broken Heart Quotes

“as unlikely as it may sound, in fact this sorrow is the gateway to lasting happiness, the kind that can never be taken from you.”
― Susan Piver, The Wisdom of a Broken Heart: An Uncommon Guide to Healing, Insight, and Love

“Instead of making it safe, love—whether for all beings or for one—actually breaks your heart. Being loved is uncomfortable; and the more I love, the more uncomfortable it is. In the end, I’m still not quite sure what I’ve vowed to do either as a wife or a bodhisattva, except to break my own heart, over and over. And to see what happens next.”
― Susan Piver, The Wisdom of a Broken Heart: An Uncommon Guide to Healing, Insight, and Love

“No matter how much help you ask for, cultivating these spiritual qualities is something you have to do within yourself, and it requires solitude. So if you feel like locking your door, closing the blinds, and retreating from the world, this is probably a good idea. Sit with the darkness. Allow it to teach you. This is a very brave thing to do.”
― Susan Piver, The Wisdom of a Broken Heart: An Uncommon Guide to Healing, Insight, and Love

“I realized that in depression, nothing matters,” she said. “And in sadness, everything matters.”
― Susan Piver, The Wisdom of a Broken Heart: An Uncommon Guide to Healing, Insight, and Love

“My heart, which I thought had been dead, stopped. Of course. I had been betrayed. My ex boyfriend had reneged on his promise to love me, and this odious event had a name: betrayal. Somehow, knowing this calmed me down. And I began to contemplate betrayal. My conclusion? It is the most difficult of all woundings. Betrayal comes in many forms. It's not just about being cheated on or left for another. It's about any promise, overt or implied, that has been broken without your participation in the decision, or even knowing that a decision was on the table. It's about believing something that you later find out is untrue. It's no wonder that the first response to betrayal is likely to be denial. It's an enormous shock to find out that a solid reality is not so solid after all. It can feel like the most deviant form of attack. When betrayal is at the root of your pain, something horrible is unleashed. Different and perhaps more horrible than the pain of disappointment, grief, or anger. With other causes of suffering, you can at least pretend you have some measure of control. You can blame the other person for disappointing you, you can read books that outline and predict the course of grief, and when you're angry you can always fall back on self-righteousness. But when you're betrayed, you have been blindsided and your vulnerability is confirmed. You lose a misplaced innocence that you really can never regain. Your ability to trust is basically obliterated. And not just your trust in your own perceptions and your trust in the person you loved. Once you lose trust in one person, your trust in all beings is undermined, making the future seem like a giant landmine.”
― Susan Piver, The Wisdom of a Broken Heart: An Uncommon Guide to Healing, Insight, and Love

“It (becoming disheartened) is insidious, buried, sticky . . . like a weird smell you can't quite pinpoint and eventually get used to.

Becoming disheartened is actually one of three forms of laziness; the others are procrastination and being too busy.”
― Susan Piver, The Wisdom of a Broken Heart: An Uncommon Guide to Healing, Insight, and Love

“Our culture generally views tears and what may lie behind them—sadness, anger, disappointment, fear—as signs of a problem. Something has gone wrong. Somebody needs to figure out who screwed up so we can set this thing right. But tears are actually sweet things. They are signs of authentic feelings. Of”
― Susan Piver, The Wisdom of a Broken Heart: An Uncommon Guide to Healing, Insight, and Love

“When you are filled with fear, anxiety, or other difficult emotions, the first thing you should always do is make friends with them.”
― Susan Piver, The Wisdom of a Broken Heart: An Uncommon Guide to Healing, Insight, and Love

“real fearlessness is the product of tenderness. It comes from letting the world tickle your heart, your raw and beautiful heart. You are willing to open up, without resistance or shyness, and face the world”
― Susan Piver, The Wisdom of a Broken Heart: An Uncommon Guide to Healing, Insight, and Love

“It’s so unfunnily ironic that when you find love, you also find the sorrow of impermanence.”
― Susan Piver, The Wisdom of a Broken Heart: An Uncommon Guide to Healing, Insight, and Love

“Wisdom is not simply knowing how to avoid casting others in your drama, it is learning how to turn off the projector altogether. This is the ultimate, the finest, the deepest, and, truly, the only way to love fully.”
― Susan Piver, The Wisdom of a Broken Heart: An Uncommon Guide to Healing, Insight, and Love

“saw that I had a choice. I could insist that he get into character with my projected ideal partner, or I could drop it all and try to love this actual human being instead.”
― Susan Piver, The Wisdom of a Broken Heart: An Uncommon Guide to Healing, Insight, and Love

“Learning that you have an endless supply of love in your heart and that no amount of relationship woe can ever quench that flame is”
― Susan Piver, The Wisdom of a Broken Heart: An Uncommon Guide to Healing, Insight, and Love

“It is a wonderful truth that, buried in the muck and mire of that most devastating of emotional difficulties, a broken heart, is the possibility of freedom from suffering.”
― Susan Piver, The Wisdom of a Broken Heart: An Uncommon Guide to Healing, Insight, and Love

“THE NEXT TIME you notice that despair is driving you and you don’t know how to believe in happiness anymore, slow down. Pick up a pen and a piece of paper and write down the wish that is at the center of your desperation: “I”
― Susan Piver, The Wisdom of a Broken Heart: An Uncommon Guide to Healing, Insight, and Love

“Let “I intend to find happiness” become “I intend to find happiness to benefit myself and the others in my life.” Let “I set the intention to feel no more misery” become “I set the intention to help all beings escape from misery, beginning with myself.” You can convert any poison into medicine by applying the proper wisdom.”
― Susan Piver, The Wisdom of a Broken Heart: An Uncommon Guide to Healing, Insight, and Love

“When I think my actions will benefit others and not just myself, I find courage where I thought I had none. Holding others in my heart brings an uplifted quality to my actions, and I feel that I am being wise.”
― Susan Piver, The Wisdom of a Broken Heart: An Uncommon Guide to Healing, Insight, and Love

“The way to ensure that your emotional experience of heartbreak is healing and not poisonous is to examine your intention in working with your feelings. Do you want to become whole so that you can love again? Or do you want to banish your emotions so that you don’t have to feel them? An intention that is rooted in a feeling of power, loving-kindness, and compassion is far more effective than one rooted in fragility, bitterness, and insecurity. Paying attention to and constantly resetting your intention (to heal in the name of love) mark it apart from desperation and instead make it the first link in a positive karmic chain.”
― Susan Piver, The Wisdom of a Broken Heart: An Uncommon Guide to Healing, Insight, and Love

“to counter longing, pay attention to the present moment; to counter rage, invite sadness; and to reverse disheartenment, introduce an element of precision to your environment.”
― Susan Piver, The Wisdom of a Broken Heart: An Uncommon Guide to Healing, Insight, and Love

“real fearlessness is the product of tenderness. It comes from letting the world tickle your heart, your raw and beautiful heart. You are willing to open up, without resistance or shyness, and face the world … If a person does not feel alone and sad, he cannot be a [spiritual] warrior at all…”
― Susan Piver, The Wisdom of a Broken Heart: An Uncommon Guide to Healing, Insight, and Love

“Although it is tremendously disorienting on one hand, on another, you will never see as clearly as you do when your heart is broken. If you’ve ever wanted to get at the truth about your life, your character and destiny, the depth of your friendships, you can choose to see these things now.”
― Susan Piver, The Wisdom of a Broken Heart: An Uncommon Guide to Healing, Insight, and Love

“When you are in this state, you walk with poets, saints, and revolutionaries—anyone who has ever been forced out of his or her customary life by sudden loss and was made stronger by it. These great souls are your compadres now, and they include our greatest poets, sages, musicians, and artists. Identify your own brothers and sisters of the Dark Night. They’re definitely out there. Ask yourself: Of the songwriters, painters, saints, and revolutionaries I know of, which ones experienced what I am experiencing now and returned to teach about it? Whose art or life expresses what I feel? Who has encountered the Dark Night and faced it with the kind of courage and openness I aspire to?”
― Susan Piver, The Wisdom of a Broken Heart: An Uncommon Guide to Healing, Insight, and Love

“It starts with the realization that a broken heart is nothing to be ashamed of. It is an altered state, an experience of sacred openness.”
― Susan Piver, The Wisdom of a Broken Heart: An Uncommon Guide to Healing, Insight, and Love

“A Dark Night of the Soul is not the universe’s attempt to rob you of happiness or beat you into submission—on the contrary. It is a natural cycle of life that teaches you the meaning of happiness beyond pleasure. It offers the opportunity for liberation from inauthenticity. If you acknowledge the Dark Night and open to it, it will teach you extraordinary lessons about who you are and what your life is about.”
― Susan Piver, The Wisdom of a Broken Heart: An Uncommon Guide to Healing, Insight, and Love

“most pressing questions: Who am I? What am I doing with my life? How can what I most desire (love) be also what is most treacherous? Losing love re-focuses all of your attention away from intellectual, physical, or professional concerns and places it instead on love itself, to beg perhaps the most critical question of all: How can I permit myself to love when the possibility of loss cannot be denied? These now become the most important questions in the world and they demand exploration.”
― Susan Piver, The Wisdom of a Broken Heart: An Uncommon Guide to Healing, Insight, and Love

“There is a way, however, to turn poison into medicine. Depending on how it’s used, a single substance can be either poisonous or medicinal.”
― Susan Piver, The Wisdom of a Broken Heart: An Uncommon Guide to Healing, Insight, and Love

“Coming out of your head and into your environment can help cut anxiety for a few moments, and in those moments you have a chance to regain equilibrium.”
― Susan Piver, The Wisdom of a Broken Heart: An Uncommon Guide to Healing, Insight, and Love

“if you try to prevent strong emotion, you’re always on the defensive. If you never put up your guard in the first place, you have nothing to defend and therefore nothing to worry about.”
― Susan Piver, The Wisdom of a Broken Heart: An Uncommon Guide to Healing, Insight, and Love

“brilliant life is not about being untouched by sorrow but has more to do with relaxing and allowing the world to touch you. It’s way braver to open yourself to the world than to wall yourself off from it.”
― Susan Piver, The Wisdom of a Broken Heart: An Uncommon Guide to Healing, Insight, and Love

“Here was a path that led you, not away from strong emotion but directly toward it; one that applauded the ability to feel deeply—not for its dramatic qualities but for its vividness and intelligence.”
― Susan Piver, The Wisdom of a Broken Heart: An Uncommon Guide to Healing, Insight, and Love