The Power of a Broken-Open Heart: Life-Affirming Wisdom from the Dying

This book is an absolute must read for anyone who has recently lost a loved one, and for everyone who just needs to heal from a loss of any kind - recent or not. Julie helps us to realize that life is a series of transitions and helps each of us accept our own mortality. An inspiring book filled with amazing wisdom, it has helped me and has made a remarkable difference in the lives of those with whom I have shared it. The Power of a Broken-Open Heart should be mandatory reading for every hospice and medical facility employee, grief counselor and beyond.

I first experienced Rev. Julie Interrante as a guest speaker at the Albuquerque Center for Spiritual Living. She spoke on the cycles of life using the metaphor of an acorn's adventure that really stuck with me. For an acorn to become an oak tree, in order to break open, first it has to go into a lonely unknowing in a lightless underground. Still then, the roots have to grow even further into the darkness just as the shoot pushes towards the opposite unknown of breaking the ground, experiencing night, day, rain, wind and snow, and giving way to growing limbs and leaves and -- new acorns. What I took away was that in so very many ways, I don't know and can't know exactly what is going on in any given moment or day or year of my life-adventure. Yet somehow in embracing that unknowingness, I still only discover what a particular experience was about "in the rear-view mirror" of my life. Julie calls this embracing process: The Power of a Broken Open heart. In one place, Julie says, "... it can be helpful to look at life the way it really happens, not how we think it should happen. Life is a mystery, which means that sometimes it will not go according to our plan." Too often we hold our gifts and our joys at arms length - just tantalizingly out of our reach. Through a series of actual life experiences, Julie tells how it is possible to give up tendencies towards how it could be or should be, and who you think you are, and begin to live into an unexplainable knowingness that is both infinitely humbling and infinitely empowering. Julie points out that the keys to the jewels of our lives lie in allowing ourselves to fully experience experiences, fully feel feelings, fully embrace unknowns. This creates an awareness of ourselves, our surroundings, our relationships to others, which in turn expands our ability to more deeply and fully appreciate them all, and our lives grow richer and fuller in unimagined and unimaginable ways in the process. This is a beautiful little 132-page book on life and living that you will most likely read many times.

When nothing is left to lose, the greatest wisdom can appear. "The Power of a Broken-Open Heart: Life-Affirming Wisdom from the Dying" is a collection of stories and anecdotes on the vulnerability of mankind from those who are at the fringe of their mortality. The dying offer much insight in life on what is really important and author Julie Interrante hopes to present it here so the living can fully realize it. "The Power of a Broken-Open Heart" is a read to be very much considered by those trying to better understand their own lives.