The Wisdom of a Broken Heart: How to Turn the Pain of a Breakup into Healing, Insight, and New Love

The New York Times bestselling author of The Hard Questions presents “an ideal guide for anyone suffering from a broken heart” (Tara Branch, author of Radical Acceptance), complete with a practical and compassionate guide for emerging bolder and happier.

When a relationship ends, the anguish and disappointment can be devastating. A broken heart is genuinely traumatic. Typical recommendations to keep busy, move on, repair your hidden flaws, and then forget about it may not be helpful. In these pages, Susan Piver reveals that heartbreak actually creates an opportunity for genuine emotional and spiritual transformation, enabling you to emerge on the other side stronger, softer, and capable of loving with renewed confidence.

In the years following her own experience, relationship writer Susan Piver searched the world’s wisdom traditions and discovered that heartbreak can be an uncompromising teacher of authenticity, power, and even joy. She shares that wisdom here, with instantaneously recognizable anecdotes, insights, on-the-spot practices, exercises, meditations, and down-to-earth advice that make The Wisdom of a Broken Heart a steadying prescription of solace and encouragement, wisdom and humor during the hardest time of your life. Like an infinitely patient, trusted friend, Piver tells you in a thousand different ways the most important thing to remember and the easiest to forget: “You’re going to be okay.”

Susan Piver is the bestselling author of The Hard Questions: 100 Essential Questions to Ask Before You Say ‘I Do,’ and the award-winning How Not to Be Afraid of Your Own Life. A graduate of a Buddhist seminary, she writes the relationships column for Body & Soul magazine and is a frequent guest on network television, including The Oprah Winfrey Show, Today, and The Tyra Banks Show. She lives in Boston.