Ten Things to Do When Your Life Falls Apart:

An Emotional and Spiritual Handbook

Daphne Rose Kingma

Add layoffs, foreclosures, and skyrocketing health-care costs to the inevitable crises of every life, and you have today's landscape. Amid these challenges, even those who thought they had solid coping skills feel that their center cannot hold as things fall apart.

In her first book in many years, bestselling author Daphne Rose Kingma takes us on a path of emotional and spiritual healing, with particular attention to the complex and frequently overwhelming circumstances of our lives right now. The perfect combination of empathic friend, sage counselor, savvy problem solver, and even gallows humorist, Kingma looks straight into the predicaments so many of us face. She then offers ten deceptively simple yet profoundly effective strategies for coping on practical, emotional, and spiritual levels.
The devastating events cannot be changed, but after reading this book, you will be, having recovered a sense of equanimity, spirit, and strength. Whether you're struggling with money issues, job loss, relationship problems, an unexpected health crisis, or all of the above, this book will light your path and heal your heart.

And here's what Marianne Williamson, author of RETURN TO LOVE had to say about it, ""Anyone going through a dark night of the soul needs to have this book. It will be your closest companion and your most tender angel. Daphne Rose Kingma more than speaks to your soul; she knows how to heal it."

About the Author: Daphne Rose Kingma is the author of The Ten Things to Do When Your Life Falls Apart. Her bestsellers include Coming Apart, The Men We Never Knew and The Future of Love. A six-time guest on Oprah, she has also appeared on numerous other television shows and media outlets. A charismatic speaker, she has presented keynotes and seminars to audiences throughout the United States and Europe. She lives in Santa Barbara, California. Visit her online at http://the10thingsbook.com.

Here are three brief excerpts to show you the powerful medicine this book contains:

Hard times, more than any others, reveal to us the truth that the signature of our humanity is our emotional nature. What differentiates us from stones and butterflies is the degree to which what happens to us affects us on an emotional level. We don't just experience things -- get a divorce, lose our house, watch our dog die from eating poison -- we have feelings about these events. It is the depth and nuance of our feelings -- of our joy, sorrow, anger, and fear -- that give texture to our humanity.

Sorrow and grief are the emotions that apply when we experience loss, and crying is the body's mechanism for expressing grief. It may seem self-evident that we should cry when we're in pain, but it's surprising how much we resist our tears. Often it is only when we've been overtaken by them that we finally discover how terribly aggrieved we are.

We live in a culture that's afraid of grieving; we don't know how to cry. When our lives fall apart in one way or another, we usually try to take control of things and solve them, forget them, or deny them -- rather than experience them, accept them, or see the meaning they may hold for us. That's because underlying many of our responses to difficulty is the unstated assumption that we should be able to engage in life, liberty, and the unbridled pursuit of happiness without ever having to grieve -- over anything. It's almost as if we believe that pain, suffering, and challenge are bad and should never be a part of our path.

The truth is that pain is one of our greatest teachers, hurt can be a birth, and our sufferings are the portals to change. This being true, we need to know how to grieve, to mourn, to shed our tears, because grief is the cure for the pain of loss. Tears are the medicine of grieving.

When life is hard, when you're in a crisis, you should cry not because you're weak but because crying holds the power of healing. Tears, in fact, are the vehicle for transformation. When you cry, your loss moves through you to the point of exit. What was holding you up and eating you up, what was stuck inside your body, gets released and moves outside your body. Your physical structure is quite literally cleansed and, like a blackboard sponged clean, is available to receive the imprint of whatever wants to come next. That's why, when you have cried, you will be reborn, free to begin again.

It has been clinically demonstrated that when you suppress sadness you also suppress positive emotions. What we don't feel on one end of the emotional spectrum, we don't feel on the other. As a consequence, people who try to be happy all the time, who suppress what they perceive to be the "negative" emotions of sorrow and grief, actually, over time, become more anxious and depressed. Crying is not a sign of weakness; we shouldn't staunch our tears. They're a healing balm, a river to the future.

I don't know about you, but I've had a bunch of really great cries in my life -- days, afternoons, and nights when I took to the couch or my bed and liter-ally wailed about the hardships of life. I've cried over sweethearts who left, lovers I couldn't get rid of, bad decisions, feeling forsaken by God, people who didn't "get" me, wrecking my dancing shoes, selling my house, feeling isolated, wretched, and unloved, and feeling the impending sorrow of death. I have cried because of my stupidity, my naivete, and my lack of courage, because of tornadoes and earthquakes, because of money I lost and money that was stolen from me (a lot of both).

At times I've been surprised by the magnitude of my tears, by the amount of sheer wailing and letting go that certain circumstances called for. I've been shocked, almost worried that such a big cry might have been some sort of hysterical emotional excess, some kind of performance. But the quiet integration, the fragile and yet sublime peace that followed each vintage cry was the measure of the healing power of those tears.

I've always felt better because of having cried. I have felt reglued, reborn, strong, silken, vulnerable, permeable, powerful, radical, formidable, tender, pure, loving, exquisite, invincible, clear, new, real, whole.

When you stop and think about it, there are things worth crying about every day. So cry, for God's sake. Cry your heart out.

*Excerpted with permission from The Ten Things to Do When Your Life Falls Apart c 2010 by Daphne Rose Kingma. Printed with permission of New World Library, Novato, CA. www.newworldlibrary.com

When your life is falling apart, there's always the impulse to hold on: to him, to her, to it; to the way it was, to how you wanted it to be, to how you want it now. But in order to get through a crisis, you will have to let go of whatever is standing in your way or causing the problem; these are the handcuffs around your ankles, the tin cans tied to your tail. You will have to let go of whatever isn't serving you, whatever you no longer need, whatever keeps you from moving forward, whatever you're so attached to that you can't see where you're going.

You may have to let go of your marriage, your friends, your job, your career, your house, your self-image, the way you deal with things, your past, your dreams of the future. I don't know what you'll have to let go of. That's for you to discover, but I do know that you'll have to let go of something.

Letting go is scary. It's a free fall, an act of surrender. It's releasing ways of being and things you thought were important, and then being okay with the fact that they're gone. Though it can feel like passivity, letting go is in fact a shift in consciousness that's a critical part of how you will solve the problem. It takes courage to look at your life and say, this is a helluva pickle I'm in and I need to lighten my load -- my financial load, my emotional load, whatever kind of load it is -- so I can deal with the reality at hand.

Just as tears are a doorway to the future, so, too, is letting go. When you let go you take an active role in shaping your life because you are taking responsibility not only for an immediate change but also for whatever comes after. When you consciously decide to let go, whatever ensues doesn't just happen to you. You're not just a passive pawn in the plot. Deciding to divorce, selling your house, shredding your journal, quitting your job -- when you choose to take these actions, you are actively letting go. You are intentionally choosing to move yourself in a new direction.

We're not used to letting go. We're used to hanging on for dear life. We hang on for lots of reasons: because something is familiar; because the past is a known commodity and the future is a question mark; because we lack imagination and can't conceive of a future better than the past we've had; because blankies (no matter how ragged and trashed they are) and relationships (no matter how complete they already are or inappropriate they have become) are a comfort to us. We hang on because we've been taught that persis-tence is good and we should never give up. Or we're simply afraid of the free fall, afraid of coming alive as ourselves.

Having to let go -- of things, of the way it was, of your notion of what the future will look like -- often creates an identity crisis. We like to live according to our memories of ourselves, of how we were, of the way things used to be. Inside us are templates of these memories, armatures on which layer by plaster layer we have crafted our identities. We think we still are who we once thought we were, but changing circumstances can force us to reevaluate. As with the alcoholic bag lady roaming the streets who still thinks of herself as the prom queen, the college valedictorian who's suddenly just an average student in law school, it's hard to let go of an old identity and move on. But if you don't let go of who and what you once were, you won't be available to become whoever and whatever this crisis is inviting you to become. For instance, without the courage to let go, the small business owner who temporarily drove a cab, the special education teacher who was a waitress for a while, and the young accountant who had to move back in with his parents -- might have missed becoming the life coach, the owner of a catering business, and the hospital administrator that they have respectively become. Of course, it's easier to cling to the identity of who we once were than to imagine who we might now become, but, frankly, there isn't any future in it.

Letting go, on the other hand, asks you to believe that somewhere across the Big Tent of Life there will be another trapeze bar that you can take hold of after you've let go of this one. It's an act of terror and freedom, of trust and faith that when you let go, you will find something new, better, different.

But unlike the sidelined CEO, instead of letting go with grace, we're often more like the monkey who reaches into the narrow-mouth jar to grab the coconut inside and then get can't get his hand back out, because he just can't bear to let go of the coconut. Often, it's our desire for more that lies at the root of a crisis, and we have to let go of this desire. The happy shopper can't come home with every bargain at the mall. The refugee can't walk out of town with the kitchen stove on his back. Every form of freedom has a price. You can't have everything you've already got and everything you haven't had yet. The living room isn't big enough for the old couch and the new couch both at once. You gotta let go; you gotta take your pick.

Letting go frees up your energy and your attention. In the open field of surrender lie the seeds of new possibilities. Sometimes the content of the new possibility is nothing -- you let go and are left with absence, a vacancy. This, in itself, can be a relief: the lightness of being you feel when you've finally dropped those extra fifty pounds, the silken tranquility in the house when you finally ditch your screaming husband.

Letting go means not hoping "things will change," not bargaining or making deals -- I'll let go if; I'll let go when. It's not storing the freeze-dried body of your friendship (or your marriage or your job) in cryonic suspension. It's acknowledging that this piece of your life, this relationship, this way of doing things has served its purpose and so it is time to let go of it completely.

"Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan 'press on' has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race."

Persistence is the spiritual grace that allows you to continue to act with optimism even when you feel trapped in the pit of hell. It is the steadfast, continual, simple -- and at times excruciatingly difficult -- practice of trudging forward until the difficult present you're scared will go on forever is replaced by a future that has a new color scheme.

Persistence isn't fluffy or humorous (although it can benefit from frequent infusions of humor) or stupidly optimistic. Persistence is intention embodied, repeatedly, in action. It's seeing something through, even when it seems like you're not getting anywhere, because inside you know a solution is coming toward you that is different from the present, and that when it arrives it will hold a cornucopia of new possibilities.

Somewhere in the distance, your future is holding out its arms to meet you, ready to bring you whatever you've had the courage to ask for. It is already holding in trust whatever you have the courage to keep steadfastly moving toward. It wants to join hands with you to create the next chapter of your life, but it won't -- it can't -- if you stay riveted to the same spot, whining and complaining, passive, fearful, and resentful. That's because the future always comes toward us in exactly the spirit in which we approach it -- hands and heart open, or souls withered in defeat.

When you decide to persist, it's not because you're an idiot, not because you don't know from the inside or from looking around just how dire your current circumstances are. It's because in the face of perhaps thousands of reasons to be discouraged, you choose to be bold, to carry on, to keep on duking it out, no matter how grizzly, tedious, intractable, or seemingly hopeless the present situation may seem. The power of persistence is required especially when we're dealing with intense, emotionally devastating circumstances or bunches of hugely difficult things that have stacked up all at once. When you're facing a diagnosis of Graves' disease, a taxi accident, and the imminent death of your sister, and your boyfriend has just moved to Japan, you will definitely need to call on persistence.

Sometimes the persistence that can transform a whole life lasts just a few minutes -- as in the case of the soldier who slings his buddy's bleeding body up over his shoulder and lugs him across the desert until he can deliver him to the medivac copter. Sometimes it is a life's work, an Erin Brockovich-like crusade of endlessly knocking on doors, talking to strangers, gathering evidence, and poring through mountains of papers until, finally, you uncover the facts that can change everything.

Persistence is guts. Stick-to-itiveness. Determination. The willingness to repeat and repeat and repeat until you've achieved the desired effect. Persistence says: Don't give up!

In this sense, persistence is visionary. Expectant. A sacred journey resplendent with hope. When you persist you know, on a visceral level, that you are enacting your part in the invisible contract between you and the cosmos. Instead of feeling powerless, you feel alive. Instead of feeling hopeless, you have a sense that you're on the path to somewhere. Instead of feeling like a victim, you feel like a person of action; in your deep self you know that this choice for action will one day be rewarded with a response.

Persistence is the journey of effectiveness that allows you to hope. It is the energy that wants to get things done, to assist you in moving from crisis to solution. Persistence can take you from debt to solvency, from heartbreak to true love, from sickness to health, from foreclosure to having a home. Emotionally, it can take you from fear to joy; spiritually, it can deliver you from despair to peace. So persist, be steadfast in your undertaking, for only the path consistently traveled can deliver you to the outcome you long for.

Whatever your battle, it's never easy. The monsters never just slink back into the woods with their tails between their legs. They will fight you for every breath. There is a battle in this universe for every inch of light, and only those who persist will rise to behold the astonishing light of the sunrise.