Choose Love
Choose Love - How to move through heartache with grace and rise like a phoenix
For the first three decades of my adulthood, I had a pretty idyllic life. I Ied global innovation for more than $100 Billion in cumulative sales of iconic brands, including Pampers and Tide, was married to my best friend, an intelligent, sweet, tall, dark, handsome Italian man, raised with him our two wonderful children in a safe supportive nuclear family cocoon, all while living in Europe as our playground.
What might surprise you, is that about 5 years ago, I started feeling like perhaps I needed to be someone else, somewhere else, doing something else. I read that as a human race, we don’t have much time to change how we interact with each other and the planet to secure our survival. I wanted to help. I sent up a request, a prayer: Show me please, how can I help?
Four weeks later, while walking in the woods on a cold, damp, grey January afternoon, my husband said he wanted to end our 24 year relationship. Completely out of the blue. He didn’t want to work on it, he just wanted out. I was stunned. Why? What did I do? Is there someone else? What about our marriage commitment? What about the kids?…How will I survive? How will I find anyone else at my age?…I don’t want to sleep alone…
We drove home in silence. Shaking uncontrollably, I instinctively went into the bathroom and climbed into a hot bath. I sunk down into the water. It slowly enveloped me, wrapping me in it’s warm, comforting arms. The shaking slowly subsided. I felt empty, numb. Abandoned.
The next three months I was shattered. I could neither eat nor sleep. Mukara, the woman helping me, told me it is possible to die from a broken heart. I am glad she told me, I didn’t know this.
It made me choose to live.
I slowly put in place a set of practices to pull myself out of the black hole I was in.
I was angry at my husband for leaving. How could do this, to me, to us? But I recall reading that being angry and vindictive was like taking the rat poison and thinking the other person would die.
As I was struggling to survive, I could not handle any poison. So for myself and my children, the first practice I put in place was to choose love for my husband in the situation - to act towards and speak about him only with kindness.
This single practice, choosing love, allowed us to separate and divorce with love. And it was the first step in completely transforming my life.
I learned that it is possible to transform your life with powerful practices, grouped along a healing journey, to deliver three stages of transformation: triage, tuning in, and taking focused action.
To triage the pain, along with choosing love, it’s critical to put support in place. We are not meant to deal with life’s difficulties alone. It’s also critical to take care of yourself, i.e. choose to love yourself. This includes letting yourself mourn, eating a clean diet, enabling better sleep, regularly exercising and spending time in nature.
To tune in, meditation is an incredibly powerful too. Practicing gratitude, forgiving yourself and others, paying attention to your intuition and noticing signs and synchronicities are also important.
To take focused action, identifying and doing what you love, developing yourself, laying out what you want to happen in your life, setting clear, specific goals, and then taking steps in each area of your life toward your goals all lead to significant progress.
This, coupled with doing your best to stay open - not being attached to or trying to control the outcome - is magic. You take action and see what happens, then take the next action. If you are open to what emerges as you take each step, then take the next step towards what you love that emerges, you will be amazed at what gets created in your life. Your life transforms into something even better than you could have ever imagined.
And as we all transform into the highest version of ourselves, we will change how we interact with each other and the planet and secure a loving peaceful future for generations to come.
My life is completely transformed now. I moved to a place I love, found a wonderful new love (it is so possible to love again), left my corporate career and started my own coaching and consulting company doing work I love, recorded and published an original record album about love lost and found and wrote my first book, Choose Love, how to move through heartache with grace and rise like a phoenix.
You are a phoenix. You can transform. Are you ready to transform, and fly into the next great chapter of your life?
