070: [FEMININE FLOW] Sara Avant Stover on: heartbreak, betrayal, "falls from grace" & transformation

Welcome back, community! I am really honored to bring on my next amazing guest: Sara Avant Stover. This week's episode is perfectly timed with her latest book which is NOW live, Handbook for the Heartbroken. Today we're talking about the messy stuff —heartache, health issues, money troubles—and how they shape us. 

I so deeply appreciate this powerful conversation because Sara touches on not just the pains we face but also those "second arrows" e.g. the broken dreams that follow loss, the shame that follows a fall from grace, and everything in between. These are conversations that are often not covered in our "highlight reel" focused society but these are the openhearted conversations that in my opinion, we should be having. 

Trigger warning: today we will be covering miscarriages, abortions, betrayal, bankruptcy and more.

What we cover:

• Finding course when you’re trying not to drown
• Facing shame and rejection head on and accepting that as part of the journey
• Leaning into self-acceptance instead of spiritual bypass
• Faith and identifying your true voice as a navigator
• Rituals around finding your footing again
• The initiation of grief - grief as a means of cultural initiation 

+ so much more

 About Sara:

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. 

 To connect with Sara:
 
IG: SaraAvantStover
FB: Sara Avant Stover
LI: Sara Avant Stover

 SaraAvantStover.com 

Chapters

• 0:02 Embracing Grief and Transformation
• 7:04 Journey Through Heartbreak
• 16:55 Journey Through Heartbreak and Healing
• 29:34 Navigating Destiny
• 34:43 Embracing Heartbreak as Soul Initiation

Transcript

Kasia: 0:02

Hello and welcome to the Other Way, a lifestyle podcast exploring uncommon, unconventional or otherwise alternative approaches to life, business and health. I'm your host, kasia. I'm the founder of InFlow, a women's wellness brand that designs intentional products to help women reconnect to their unique cyclical rhythm and find a balance between being and doing. This podcast is an extension of my mission within Flow. Here we provide intentional interviews with inspiring humans, trailblazers, researchers, spiritual teachers and more on the journey of doing things the other way. On the journey of doing things the other way. Hi everyone, welcome back to the podcast. I'm Kasia, your host, and I'm so excited to welcome a very special guest. Today I am speaking with Sara Avant Stover. Sara is an author, certified internal family systems practitioner, teacher and mentor of women's spirituality and entrepreneurship. She integrates Buddhism, embodiment and psychology into her teachings and, fun fact, she is my very first teacher.

Kasia: 1:17

Yes, I discovered Sara's book the Way of the Happy Woman in 2012 when I was living in New York, raw from a very real yet very misaligned breakup. I had just moved into the city after moving out from my ex's apartment, and her book really opened up my eyes to a whole nother world of spirituality, of meditation, in just a really different way. I was introduced to cyclical living. I actually remember having a very visceral reaction to talking about my period at the time period, cups, all of that stuff. How far we have come, y'all since. I'm now building a company in the space, but, yeah, lots of feminine wounding that has since been healed. But really I would say that in many ways this book changed the course of my life. It inspired me to go to Costa Rica for my first yoga retreat, which then inspired me to change course and move to California, which I did about six months later, and that has completely influenced the entire course of my life. I mean, I met my husband here. I built a very successful career here. I disassembled that career to start a business here. I live here now and I feel so soul aligned, and so it is wild to be having this full circle moment speaking with Sara today about her latest book, which is called Handbook for the Heartbroken. Now, handbook for the Heartbroken is a book about grief, yes, but I would also describe it as a merge of a healing guide with a memoir.

Kasia: 2:53

Sara dives deep into her personal stories in this book as well as, of course, provides us with tools for healing and processing and navigating grief. But I would also say she expands on the definition of grief. We often think about grief as just a loss, and that is, of course, a very real experience of grief death, death or divorce but she talks about other forms of grief that I think often we might witness as instead more shameful falls from grace, such as her own journey of betrayal where she learned that her fiance at the time was cheating on her for many years. This was a very public fall from grace. She talks about her abortion journey and the grief around that, which is just writhed with much betrayal within itself. And then later, an infertility journey which I would say and I think she agreed as we spoke about it just now it really shifted her identity deeply. And then, of course, she talks about a financial breakdown and the shutting down of her business. I mean, this is a shakeup on all aspects of self, of stability, of identity, and I love that Sara is talking about it, because it is so rare to meet a woman, really any human, who can courageously stand up, hold this pain, this grief, share it in a vulnerable way and be seen so profoundly in what many would call vulnerable, painful falls from grace moments. And yet this is the conversation that we need to be having as a society.

Kasia: 4:34

This book is absolutely for everyone. I'm over the wellness narrative of think positive all the time and bypass your feelings. I really love how we, in reading this book, we are introducing a narrative of embracing what is real and that can sometimes be painful and ugly and it can look not like what we expected it to be and to love on that experience. That may not be the aesthetic perfect experience and moment is just so beautiful. So on today's episode, we cover how to find course when you're just trying not to drown in a grief breakdown moment.

Kasia: 5:14

We talk about navigating and facing shame and rejection head on and accepting that as part of the journey. And when I talk about shame and rejection, it's not just in the form of grief that might come from betrayal, but also as you try to lean on your community and you don't find the support you need. It can be such a lonely journey and then, on the flip side, how to find the support you need. Sara definitely dives into that in her book. We talk about leaning into self-acceptance instead of spiritual bypass. We talk about faith and identifying your true voice as a source of navigation, especially when you feel like perhaps you have betrayed yourself in some way, if your body has failed you. We talk about rituals around finding your footing, the initiation of grief and how grief might be a means of transformation and how that can be a choice, and so much more.

Kasia: 6:07

This episode is definitely a must-listen and I'm so honored and grateful to be bringing it to you Without further ado. Let's welcome Sara Avant-Stover to the podcast. Sara, welcome to the podcast. Thank you. It's great to be here with you, so wonderful to be here. The last time I saw you was at your retreat in January, which was completely life-changing for me, so it is absolutely wonderful to be here face to face and to have this like deeper one-on-one well one in front of everybody conversation.

Sara Avant Stover: 6:42

Yeah, one-on-one for many and yes, it was great having you on retreat. I'm so happy to hear it was life-changing. I want to hear more about that, but I know that's not what we're here for today, so maybe we can have that conversation off the record. Thank you for having me.

Kasia: 6:56

Oh yeah, for sure, happy to get into it. It was. It was pretty profound, so we can definitely get into that another time. But I have to say that you know, one of the things actually related to retreat that I think is so powerful is you know, I've read all of your other books and I just got a preview of the book that is coming out now or will be live when this podcast episode goes live Hand handbook for the heartbroken. And it's kind of wild how your perception of someone, especially in this student-teacher relationship, just deepens in so many ways through connecting and hearing about these human stories and you've done this with your other books, and so it's just so wonderful to have actually met you in person, having the perspective that I had first being introduced to you in 2012 when your first book came out, and then now reading all of these powerful, powerful stories. It is just like it allows me to just feel connected to your humanity in a way. It's beautiful.

Sara Avant Stover: 8:05

I'm so glad to hear that and that's one of my intentions, because I think that it can be really dangerous to put anyone on a pedestal. Because you mentioned humanity, because we are all human and I really have been intentional about sharing not only my highs but also my lows, not only my light but also my dark, with other women, to help validate that whatever experiences any other woman goes through, or whatever she thinks about herself, or whatever her life ends up looking like it's all okay, it's all part of the path.

Kasia: 8:43

So needed. Okay, it's all part of the path. So needed, that is so absolutely needed Because often in especially, I feel, the wellness world and in the world of Instagram, we don't see that. We see the perfectly curated highs, the promises of if you do this, your life will look like x or y of if you do this, your life will look like X or Y, and so I almost feel like it is even more meaningful to have you be in the position that you're in as a teacher, as an author, in this wellness space to also be sharing what are some extremely difficult, difficult lows.

Sara Avant Stover: 9:21

Yes, and one of my other intentions with writing this book and I imagine we'll get more into that into this in our conversation is how judgmental we can be towards people who are going through hard times, and I think a lot of that is set up through the wellness and the spirituality world, where it's all about just love and light and being, gratitude and manifestation, and with all that we just override so much of what life consists of and so much of who we are. And so one of my aims in writing this again is to help normalize this and to help resolve or at least lessen the stigma that we have against people when they're going through challenging times, because that can make our dark valleys even more lonely and even more treacherous. When we feel that judgment coming to us externally because we're already judging ourselves internally but it's also coming externally it makes it even more challenging.

Kasia: 10:25

Oh yeah, and to be.

Kasia: 10:27

You know, in this world where so much is in the public eye whether you are a public figure like you are yourself, or somebody who has any sort of a presence online which most people do, and a lot of the women I know you work with do in some capacity as business owners it is, I think, just so important to continue to hold on to that element of vulnerability.

Kasia: 10:50

So one of the questions I actually wanted to ask you the very first question, and I started here first of all, what was it like creating this book and putting it out into the world? Because in many ways, when I was reading it, it felt like a journal, almost Not like it wasn't written like a journal, but there were so many intimate, painful, heartbreak moments in there that I remember feeling chills one out of a feeling of resonance with so many of the stories, but two out of like, oh my gosh, she's putting this out there, like for me to read, for others to read. So what is it? What was that process like for you, and what is it like talking about it now?

Sara Avant Stover: 11:31

It was a really joyful process. I really really loved writing this book and I know that that sounds contradictory. It's a book about heartbreak and people have asked me if it was very traumatizing to write those stories or there's a lot of emotion, but I actually really really loved it and a couple of the stories I wrote years ago, like the opening story and just to orient listeners. The opening story is about me finding out that the man I was engaged to had been cheating on me for many years, and I bring readers right into that night with me. I wrote that years ago, just some months after all. That happened back in 2016. And then the second heartbreak story, which is about an abortion that I had. I also wrote that some years ago. I think I published that in 2018. And that's not the whole story I cut out. I had to condense it a lot.

Sara Avant Stover: 12:29

It was a very long story, but the bones of it I wrote years ago and the rest of them I wrote in current time as I was writing the book, and I was actually part of a writer's group while I was writing this book, and the writer's group was really about coming into our senses, knowing that good writing brings a reader, into the moment with you and helps you. Helps them just to smell, to taste, to see the colors, to see the shapes, and so that helped me to put in a lot of detail into each of those stories, which I think helps create more of a feeling of intimacy. And, like you were saying, like you're reading my journal, I also know I'm an avid reader and my favorite genre is women's memoir and I love when women are just real and vulnerable and not having any pretense, and I wanted my writing to be that way too and I wanted to do justice to my story, not gloss things over, but really help people to see what this was actually like.

Kasia: 13:38

Oh my gosh, I mean it's wild to think and honestly I think a listener needs to read some of the chapters of this book to just really be taken back to those moments that, like I, are so vivid in my mind since I just read it.

Kasia: 13:55

Right, you know, this past weekend I finished it.

Kasia: 13:58

But it's just so wild to think that you know going through some of the heartbreak that you did and I'll just like list it out without even diving into the detail but betrayal of love, crushing.

Kasia: 14:10

I think that the feelings that came up for me were feelings of either something that I had witnessed in my past or the fears that are so real for me.

Kasia: 14:19

But to go through these rounds of almost touching on every aspect of security, I think in some ways really created a bone chilling story to like live through with you as a reader. But I think it also just is in many ways so powerful and inspiring because here you are sitting on the other side speaking to an experience that, or a series of experiences, really unraveled every aspect of your life, your love life, your kind of future hopes and dreams as a woman in many ways, because you definitely dive into that with some of the other stories around your abortion and your fertility journey, and then also your finances. And I'm curious, since it sounds like this book took place over many years. You know, was it a process of processing it as you were writing it down? You know, did you have the intention of publishing it as you were writing these pieces down, or was it more of a process of looking back at it and now you can like relive it through these words, but from a different place?

Sara Avant Stover: 15:30

That's a great question. So this is my third book and the way so far the track record is that my books come to me with the title. First I get the download of the title and then I don't necessarily know what the book is, but then it's a process of kind of playing hide and seek and figuring out. So what is the book that goes along with this title? So the title Handbook for the Heartbroken came to me in 2016, just a few months after that initial heartbreak with my former fiance, and I thought it was just going to be a book about grief, and so I actually started and that was the first of the griefs.

Kasia: 16:09

by the way, just to kind of like interject, let's just. Let's just say that was like the intense beginning and the first of a series, ladies.

Sara Avant Stover: 16:17

Yeah, so several more that that. That happened between 2016 and 2020. And so I, originally, I started working on the table of contents and a sample chapter for that book and I actually submitted it to my old publisher in 2018. And they didn't want to publish it because they said books on grief don't sell well and come to 2020. Later, in 2020, I was nearing the end of this intense cycle and the book was still with me.

Sara Avant Stover: 16:58

Handbook for the Heartbroken was still with me and throughout 2021, I was rebuilding my career because I stepped away from it for a couple of years. It's another story in the book and as I was doing that, I kept listening Is this am I meant to write this book? Am I meant to write this book? And by the end of 2021, this being this creative, sacred being of Handbook for the Heartbroken, was like yes. So in 2022, january, early January we're sitting down, we're starting to write the proposal. So I knew that I was meant to write about this whole experience. I had processed it very thoroughly.

Sara Avant Stover: 17:34

Basically, healing was my full-time job during those several years. It was my primary focus. I didn't feel like anything was unprocessed and I would have never shared all of these things had it not been for this book and knowing that I was meant to write this book and I was meant to share these stories so that other women could have this lighthouse when they're facing their own falls from grace, when they're facing their own challenges.

Sara Avant Stover: 18:03

And this book expands the conversation around heartbreak. It's not just about deaths and breakups although those are, for sure, very real, devastating heartbreaks but also, like you mentioned, financial challenges, career challenges, identity shifts, identity losses, health challenges, an aging parent or a troubled teen. There are just so many different ways that heartbreak and setbacks can come to us. And it's also about healing past heartbreaks that we didn't have the resources internally or externally to process when we were going through them in real time. We've all had those. There's nothing wrong with that when it happens. But then, when we go through a current day heartbreak, all of that old baggage is going to come up to be processed, and that's a big part of also what I was doing over those several years, wow.

Kasia: 19:00

One of the questions that came up for me as I was reading this. Now, of course, I was reading a book, so it was like heartbreak after heartbreak after heartbreak, with a lot of guidance and tools in between. But from my point of view, I was really trying to immerse myself in the story, and it felt like these blows came one after another and I think one of the things that I want to call out for listeners out there, especially those who might be going through something like this I think that there's a profound sense of loneliness in the experience of heartbreak. May it be a heartbreak of betrayal, my gosh, that's like complete stability, like a shakeup of stability or, you know, heartbreak of your identity and the dreams you might've had for yourself as you kind of go into your fertility journey or your abortion journey, again also intertwined with a story of betrayal in there too, which is just wild to conceive of.

Kasia: 19:57

And then, of course, the finances that we talked about. All of these were so they were in a pretty close span of time. I'm curious how did you keep yourself afloat? Because you definitely dive into how you were processing grief and the importance of allowing your emotions to be felt and not to kind of bypass them in many ways and, you know, affirm them out of existence. And yet, at the same time, it's like it felt to me, like the second, that you were turning a corner. Another wave was coming at you of just complete shaking up of some aspect of your stability, your identity and your heart.

Sara Avant Stover: 20:36

Well, there were a number of times where I didn't feel like I was staying afloat. There were times where and I'm not exaggerating where I felt like all of this was going to kill me, and there were times where I wanted to kill myself. Those were very real experiences that I had and I know that those are very real experiences that a lot of people have when they're going through hard times. And there were, you know, again, this lasted several years. I never, never, could have imagined that I would go through so much hardship for so long without, without a reprieve. And so I think I just didn't know.

Sara Avant Stover: 21:14

I just, in the beginning, I would think, you know, a year would pass and I think, oh, this next year is going to be the year where I have my rebirth, where there's a turnaround, and then something else happened.

Sara Avant Stover: 21:26

Then the next year I'm going to have my rebirth, my turnaround, then something else happened, and so that happened enough times until I reached a point where I just said forget it, I'm not going to imagine that this is the year that things are going to shift, I'm just going to be where I am, and maybe this is how the rest of my life is going to be.

Sara Avant Stover: 21:42

So there was just a resignation and an acceptance, and I would say the main things that kept me going was just the one day at a time, mentality and the phrase that opens up my book, which is this too shall pass, and just knowing that is a universal truth impermanence this too shall pass, and knowing. You know, my first book is about seasons and knowing the cyclical nature of life. If there is a deep winter, if there is a dark night, there has to be a spring, there has to be a dawn. I knew that, but I didn't know when it was going to come, and so just trusting in that the cyclical nature of life definitely helped. And there are many times, like I said, where I also doubted that I was gonna make it.

Kasia: 22:32

I feel that so deeply as I think about my own heartbreaks. You know I'm not in a season of actually that's not true I literally just had a heartbreak, like a massive heartbreak last weekend. I mean I think this is part of the seasonality, right, if you are in an experience of spring, heartbreak last weekend, I mean I think this is part of the seasonality, right, like if you are in an experience of spring, you're not thinking about the winter, the winter is not hitting you perhaps as hard as it did when you were in it, right, In many ways kind of reflecting on that Exactly. Yeah, so I'm curious because you know you talk in the book about some of the tools that are obviously supportive and I, as somebody who has followed you as one of my teachers, I know that you are a deeply spiritual being. You are actually a teacher of female spirituality as one of the things that you cover.

Kasia: 23:25

I'm curious how did your relationship to the divine and to faith in the universe evolve? Because you talk about in the book and I really love this topic, by the way because you talk about in the book the kind of having to set aside for a while, like the Abraham Hicks positive affirmation type of vibes which I do feel like a lot of wellness language talks about right, like just focus on the positive, don't experience the negative. So how has your relationship evolved through this journey and does it? Does it look different, like as you kind of think about your faith and trust that there will be another summer, not just willing it into mental existence and then having it become so?

Sara Avant Stover: 24:10

I would say my primary spiritual practice has been rooted in Buddhism. I don't consider myself a Buddhist, but I lived in Thailand for a decade in my 20s and that was really my core orientation and also yoga, and those two together for me, were always about really being with myself as I am, and I found that to be really, really liberating and supportive throughout my life. And so I had that foundation going into all of this, and those equipped me with kind of the inner ground of being to be able, like they grew my capacity to be able to be with the big hard feelings like crushing grief, or I had so much anxiety, especially after the betrayal, so much anxiety, depression. I experienced a lot of depression over those years, and so those fundamental practices just helped me to be with myself without needing to fix or change anything. And then, like I mentioned, I reached various points along the way where I felt like, okay, this should be over by now. I must be doing something wrong. If this is still happening, it must be my negative thinking or I just haven't mastered myself. And so I would turn more intently towards teachings of Abraham Hicks or Joe Dispenza or something to try to shift my state, change my reality, to up-level my thinking, to master my emotions, but those only made things worse for me. To master my emotions but those only made things worse for me, made me feel worse about myself, because then, when things still weren't changing, I made me feel like even more of a failure. So I reached a point where I just dropped all of that and went back to the basics of my Buddhist meditation just noticing sensations, body noticing sensations, body feelings, dropping the story and having compassion for myself. So that.

Sara Avant Stover: 26:18

And then prayer. And when I say prayer it doesn't have a religious tie to it, it's just a two-way conversation between you, and whatever you sense is the source of your existence. Whatever you sense is the source of your existence, that's the universe, your higher being. For me it's God, which is not a man in the sky, but it's the source of existence and I have an intimate relationship with God.

Sara Avant Stover: 26:42

And so these years really deepened that connection, deepened my prayer, deepened my ability to listen, so that I could get out of my own way, really, because I kept putting a plan in place and that plan kept exploding in my face. And when that kept happening, I just needed to keep asking like what's my next right step. What would you have me do now and that really deepened my faith period so that when hard things are happening, when things are not going my way, I know there's a larger force guiding me, I can surrender to the divine plan of my life, can align with divine order and I know somehow things will work out. And it's likely not going to be in the way that I wanted it to or expected it to, likely not going to be in the way that I wanted it to or expected it to.

Kasia: 27:34

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Kasia: 28:38

Now back to the episode. So you are a teacher who works with many female entrepreneurs and as part of what you teach, I know you definitely talk about the power of having a vision, and I'm curious how do you balance the two? Right, like you talked about in many times, the kind of desire to out positive yourself into another state, right, and then having that plan blow up in your face. And so I'm curious now in your life, how do you find balance between, in many ways, surrendering to things as they are and maybe just being able to make the immediate next step, especially for somebody who's going through a very difficult time, versus having that vision that creates the motivation and the inspiration for a brighter future? How do you balance the two?

Sara Avant Stover: 29:34

Well, when I, when I tune into my vision or when I work with women to tune into their visions, it's not a vision from the ego, it's not a vision from our human personality that that is part of it. But ultimately the vision comes from our soul, from who we ultimately are. And we all know deep down what we are destined for. If we really get honest with ourselves, if we really get quiet and clear, we all have that sense. And so my work is to continue to be in touch with that, to continue to use that as my North Star, and then when we do that, we're always going to have a balance of support and challenge on the path. We need both to help us to grow. And you mentioned my work with women entrepreneurs. When I'm working with women entrepreneurs, I give them both as well from me, support and challenge. And then when we have that, we can see that whatever comes up is not in the way, but it's on the way to fulfilling that destiny.

Sara Avant Stover: 30:37

And so my sense in those years was that my soul was on a journey. I knew at some level that my soul had chosen those events to help me to become who I need to be to fulfill my destiny and my human self had specific things that I wanted to be included in that to have a relationship that looked a certain way, to have a child or children, to have a family that looked a certain way, to have a career that looked a certain way. But there's the humility of those falls from grace, of those things getting toppled over and seeing, okay, those are not part of it, at least not in that particular configuration. But it doesn't mean that that destiny is not valid. That doesn't mean that I'm not still moving towards embodying that vision.

Kasia: 31:29

Yeah, so it's both, and and I love that and I also just kind of am reflecting out loud how the vision that, for example, I would have imagined for myself, speaking through my own experience as like a child, looks so different than where I ended up and how many difficult ebbs and flows along the way to get here, and massive heartbreaks and redirections. I feel very aligned and connected with that. Of course, reading your book definitely brought up some little fears of oh my gosh, how it's all pretty transient really and you don't know what to expect, because heartbreak can come at any time. But it is, I think, important to note that it kind of makes more sense looking back than it does when you're in the moment, and I truly love that.

Kasia: 32:25

I also love the statement that you have mentioned multiple times falls from grace, because when we talk about heartbreak, we often think about, oh my gosh, the experience that we're having.

Kasia: 32:36

We often think about, oh my gosh, the experience that we're having, but in many ways, as you talk about in the book one, there is a lot of community potential or community needed in healing, yes, but there's also, as you mentioned early on, a lot of judgment that can be present, and I will frankly say that there were even moments in your book when you were bringing up certain topics where I felt there was a part of me to use IFS terms that cringed a little bit around like, oh my gosh, not only are you having that experience or you had that experience, but maybe I had something similar and I'm having a memory of that.

Kasia: 33:11

For example, the choice to, let's say, shut down your business, right which you talked about and go back and get a quote regular job right. How that felt in the moment. And I was imagining, oh my gosh, if my business failed, if I had to do that, how would that feel? And it just felt so impossible to kind of live through that and imagine that. I'm curious what was the process of A allowing yourself to kind of, in many ways, come face to face with these judgments and then, on the other side, let people in and not everybody, because it sounded also like a lot of people fell away from you as you were going through these experiences.

Sara Avant Stover: 33:54

So yeah, that's a great question and I think for me, the most important thing was that I stayed connected to my truth. So, even when I had my abortion, that and I talk about that in the story just the whole process that I decision making process that I went through around that I didn't make my decision until I was in touch with my deep truth. Same with closing down my business, it was something that parts of me considered doing, but it wasn't until I got that deep truth that, Sara, you know it was this image like this is a shoe that doesn't fit anymore. It is time to let this you're not supposed to do this let this go. And, yes, that was so hard. There was so much of my identity wrapped up in that, but that was my deep truth. And so, and even at the end, you know, I had moved to California as part of this process. I thought I was going to stay there for the rest of my life, or at least years to come, but there was an unexpected thing that came where I needed to move in 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, and I tuned in to my truth and it kept saying move back to Colorado, move back to Colorado. I swore I would never come back here. Never come back here, but this is what my truth was guiding me to.

Sara Avant Stover: 35:14

So it's like if I'm connected to that, it ultimately, ultimately, it doesn't matter what other people think, because my truth is my truth and that's what I need to do. We talk about fulfilling our destiny. It's like if we're not listening to that, we're not gonna fulfill our destiny, we're not gonna be on our true path. We're gonna be on the path that we think that we want or we think other people want us to have. And it also clarifies around us the people who are in support of us and the people who aren't. And that's not easy by any stretch of the imagination.

Sara Avant Stover: 35:46

I lost a lot of relationships over those years and that's another thing I talk about in this book how there's like this cascade of losses that come with heartbreaks. So, for instance, if you get a divorce, you could lose your home, you could lose your pet, you could lose 50% custody of your children, you could lose financial security, you can develop health challenges because of all the stress from the situation. You can lose some friendships and social status. So there's a lot of ripple effects that come when we go through hard times and there's always going to be a shaking out in our social structure. The people who stay with us are the people who usually have been through something challenging themselves and they don't feel a sense of like revulsion by what we're going through. Don't feel a sense of like revulsion by what we're going through because they're not they're not afraid of it, because they have already met it within themselves. Oh my God.

Kasia: 36:46

Wow, wow. That is so powerful I think too, to point that out that they have met it within themselves. Wow, I think that truly summarizes just a powerful shift in how to look at rejection that perhaps can come judgment, rejection that can come with falls from grace. I'm curious because you talk about how important it was for you in this journey to get in touch with that deep inner voice. There were some heartbreaks that you talk about on this journey that really did shake up your identity, right, I would you know there were many, but just to use maybe two as an example.

Kasia: 37:33

But I think the kind of the decision to have an abortion, which was just riddled with so much complexity I cannot emphasize that enough Like to hear the story of that was just wow, the kind of the circumstances, and then to have that followed with a shift in your fertility journey shortly thereafter, it was like the next wave that followed. I wonder and this came up for me it was like wow, like how did you continue to trust yourself seeing having this experience of in many ways I think you even mentioned this in the book but like feeling betrayed by your body or what you expected your body to be doing for you to have it work out the certain way. So how did you continue to tap into that voice within and trust that, because I think there's still some story, even as I'm describing it, kind of recollecting what you had shared. So how did you learn to recognize the true inner voice and continue to hold on to that when, in many ways, one could feel like there's like a betrayal of yourself is betraying you in some crazy way?

Sara Avant Stover: 38:41

the first thing that comes to mind is coming back to that conversation around soul and when I would feel really lost or adrift. And I remember many mornings that I woke up in the months after my abortion and you know those moments when you're first waking up and kind of your mind starts coming back online like you can forget where you are. You just forget where your life is, and it's more pronounced when we're going through hard times, but it happens every day and then you start to come into more of the more concretization of of our lives. And when that, when I was going through those liminal waking up phases in the months after my abortion, I would just be incredulous of how did this? How did I end up here, Like, how is this my life?

Sara Avant Stover: 39:29

I was so, I felt so disoriented and just I was not at all where I thought I would be or how I thought I would be.

Sara Avant Stover: 39:37

So there was a lot of reckoning there and a lot of disorientation and throughout I kept just coming back to my soul and having the intention to align with my highest self and just to continue, just to hand it over to my highest self and knowing that that deeper part of me knew the way through, Even though I didn't understand how that was going to happen.

Sara Avant Stover: 40:03

I just knew that, just with that intention and continuing to reorient in that direction, somehow that was going to help. And that goes back to what I was saying earlier about just continuing also to align with divine order. So when our lives are chaotic and topsy-turvy, it's just taking time, even just when we're laying in bed at night, or if you have a meditation practice, or even if you're standing in the shower or in the bath. It's just having that intention to align with my higher self and to align with the divine plan for my life, to align with divine order. And during those times and when we don't know the way through, or when we feel betrayed or we feel just lost, we're going to find our way through, or something deeper in us is going to find the way through for us.

Kasia: 40:53

I love that and witnessing you talking about it now, I think is just a wonderful reminder as well. You talk about in the book a bit about, and I love that you brought it back to this and I'm not quoting you here, but I made a note of kind of how in many ways heartbreak can be a initiation of some sort and like a transitionary period. And I'm curious, how do you view that now, especially having written books on many kind of the heroine's journey, like a book themed around the heroine's journey, a book themed around feminine cycles and the initiation there? How do you bring heartbreak into that as a transitionary cycle?

Sara Avant Stover: 41:39

Well, I see it as one of the key ways that our souls evolve. So for me these past several years, I know that those were a powerful soul initiation, particularly the midlife initiation, which is a whole other topic. But I was grateful to have that map to track myself in the different stages of my midlife. My soul's midlife initiation, which is about shedding the false personality and aligning with who we truly are, so that on the other side of that we can fully step into our life's work, what our souls came here to do, in partnership with our personalities, with our incarnated self.

Sara Avant Stover: 42:26

And I think from studies that I've done in more ancient cultures there was more understanding and more space around this that for someone to be a healer or a wise person or a shaman, a medicine person, they needed to go through an initiation that usually involved a lot of challenge and suffering in order to have the depth and the soul qualities needed to be in that role of service.

Sara Avant Stover: 42:55

They need to have qualities like patience and perseverance and faith and strength and compassion that aren't just going to magically appear. They need to be cultivated through this churning that we have during hard times that we have during hard times. So I see that that was an initiation for me and that's one of the perspectives that I want to invite others to hold as you read this book. That's different from our dominant cultural perspective of hardship, which is that, you know, we have a very narrow view of success, going from point A to point B, and if you veer off of that in any way, then you're a failure. There's something wrong with you, or you know. Hurry up, get back in line. Not at all. We need, we need these zigzags, we need these falls to actually become wise, whole, mature, integrated human beings and to truly be of service, especially on this planet at this time where there's a lot of challenge. The best leaders during these times are going to be the leaders who know how to show up when excuse my French, but the shit hits the fan.

Kasia: 44:09

What a powerful message, I think, for everyone out there. Really listening to this and you know it's it's funny because there is there was an element of for me personally, grasping. When I was reading the book I was like oh, like, uh since in this moment I'm not going through a massive heartbreak Like when I was reading this. It was. It was really, really interesting, but I was like, oh gosh, it was more a feeling around fear what if this would happen? How would I react?

Kasia: 44:44

And there's just this resistance that I feel in my body towards heartbreak and towards a shakeup, towards change. And I know that I'm not alone in that and I feel like, in many ways, that resistance almost makes the experience, when it does happen, whether you're anticipating it or you're in it just so much worse. And that's why I just I loved not just hearing the stories which made me feel so deeply connected to you, somebody who I've been on retreat with but I obviously don't know that well but I also really appreciate this perspective and the ability to have these raw, honest conversations about a very real human part of our experience here on Earth.

Sara Avant Stover: 45:33

It's just so important and that resistance is part of the process. So it's okay for us to not expect that we're not going to have that resistance, and a big part of kind of surviving heartbreak is just surviving the resistance to. I don't want this to be happening. This sucks, this hurts. I don't want to feel this. Yeah.

Kasia: 45:55

Well, sara, I could keep chatting with you for hours, but we are coming up on time, so I want to be mindful of that Before we wrap. I would love for you to share with our audience where can people find you anything exciting that you want to share about the book or anything that you have coming up so?

Sara Avant Stover: 46:12

you can find me through the book's website, which is handbookfortheheartbrokencom, and there you can find links to buy the book wherever books are sold, and there's also some gifts there. So if you want to send in your receipt to me, you can receive some extra gifts to accompany your heartbreak journey as you read the book. And from that website, handbookfortheheartbrokencom, you can also find everything that I do. You can find my podcast, which is called Herself. You can find me on Instagram at saraavantstover. com, and my online programs and in-person retreats. Thank you this is beautiful.

Kasia: 46:50

Thank you so much for tuning into the Other Way. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a five-star review. It really helps the podcast grow and I'm ever Other Way. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a five-star review. It really helps the podcast grow and I'm ever so grateful. If you want to stay connected, you can find information on how in our show notes. And finally, if you're curious about inflow and want free resources around cyclical living or moon cycles, check out inflowplannercom or moon cycles, check out inflowplannercom. And, of course, for all my listeners, you can use the code podcast10, and that's all lowercase podcast10, for 10% off any purchase. All right, that's all for today. See you next time.