In a heartbreak-illiterate world, Sara Avant Stover shares the inspiration behind her new book, Handbook for the Heartbroken where she offers solace and support through personal, professional, and collective losses of all kinds—including the end of a relationship or a job, death of a loved one, a natural disaster, infertility, abortion, or a financial crisis.
After experiencing serial heartbreaks in every area of her life over a span of five years, Sara Avant Stover felt deeply impacted by our culture’s dysfunctional relationship with loss—especially for women.
We’re encouraged at every turn to hurry up and get on with it. But by trying to power through these messier seasons of life, we’re denying ourselves the very answers to our healing and growth.
An intimate and supportive mentor, Handbook for the Heartbroken will be with you when you struggle to survive your darkest hours. A sacred container for your heartbreak experience, at times this book will also mother you with a gentle power, providing fiercely loving guidance to help you continue moving forward.
Blending her expertise in Internal Family Systems (IFS) and various wisdom traditions, Sara Avant Stover identifies the three main phases of heartbreak: devastation, transformation, and rebirth. For each phase, she offers gentle lessons and supportive practices to help you navigate the unthinkable, both past and present. With personal stories, anecdotes from clients, spiritual teachings, practices, and journaling prompts, here is a trustworthy guide to help you embrace the harder seasons of life and become a wiser, more mature, integrated human being.
Handbook for the Heartbroken will show you that it’s only through fully turning toward your heartbreak (with support, courage, and compassion) that you can heal. Within the loving pages of this book, you’ll have full permission to fall apart—and slowly, organically find your way back to greater wholeness.
Meet Sara Avant Stover:
Sara Avant Stover (she/her) is the author of three books; a teacher and mentor of women's spirituality, empowerment, and entrepreneurship; and a Certified Internal Family Systems Practitioner. After graduating Phi Beta Kappa and Summa cum Laude from Columbia University’s all-women’s Barnard College, she had a cancer scare, moved to Thailand, and embarked on a decade-long healing and spiritual odyssey throughout Asia. Since then, she’s gone on to uplift tens of thousands of women worldwide. Sara has been featured in Yoga Journal, The Huffington Post, Newsweek, Natural Health, and on ABC, NBC, and CBS. She lives in Boulder, CO, and is online at SaraAvantStover.com.
“Heartbreak is an inevitable part of everyone’s life journey. It’s by returning to our essential qualities like patience, open-heartedness, and trust that we can truly heal.”
This book takes a holistic approach to not just surviving heartbreak but also transforming it into a life-affirming rite of passage”
