Buddha Breaking Up: A Guide to Healing from Heartache & Liberating Your Awesomeness

The world needs another self-help book like it needs another Reality TV show. At least, that’s what I would have said right up until I found myself in need of something—anything!—to pull me through the worst breakup of my life. What do you do when you want to be gracious, pragmatic, and filled with equanimity, but you’re so hurt and angry you feel as if you could go around town ramming your car into stationary objects without batting an eyelash? What do you do when your friends and family run out of platitudes and old, tired slogans like, “Time heals all wounds” and “Better to have loved and lost...”? (Slogans which, incidentally, make you want to scoop out your frontal lobe with a melon baller.)

This is the stuff that drives us to the very edge of annihilation. At least, it feels that way. It feels like a very real obliteration of the self. But this breakdown can be the worst thing that’s ever happened to you, or it can be the best thing for precisely this moment in your life.

Buddha Breaking Up is a modern-day spiritual guide for how to embrace dramatic, life-altering change and use it as a means of rediscovering the Self. Combining humor, pop culture, and Zen principles, Part I of Buddha Breaking Up explores the science of falling in love, provides useful tools for riding out the heartbreak—including how to handle social networking and other technology designed for liberal applications of self-torment—and offers unique and practical techniques for moving through the lowest depths of the shattering. Part II, “The Bodhicitta of Breaking Up,” illuminates methods for battling the wounded ego, dealing with anger, creating better relationships, and finally, loving and valuing yourself so you can reach a place of acceptance and grace in your new life.

Stephanee Killen grew up in the Midwest, where the weather is fickle but the people are hardy.

After working as a freelance editor for the Ballantine Publishing Group, and then as a web editor for 1stBooks Library (now Authorhouse), Stephanee went on to become the senior editor and project manager at Integrative Ink, a publishing pre-production company she established in January of 2001. Stephanee has edited work for numerous authors, including books appearing on The New York Times Best Sellers list. She has published articles in elephant journal and Huffington Post. In 2014, she was a juried poet for the Columbus Arts Festival and is a regularly performing poet based in Columbus, Ohio. In her spare time, she paints pictures, sips Ginger tea, and enjoys cosmic jokes.