Add layoffs, foreclosures, and skyrocketing health-care costs to the inevitable crises of every life, and you have today’s landscape. Amid these challenges, even those who thought they had solid coping skills feel that their center cannot hold as things fall apart. In her first book in many years, bestselling author Daphne Rose Kingma takes us on a path of emotional and spiritual healing, with particular attention to the complex and frequently overwhelming circumstances of our lives right now. The perfect combination of empathic friend, sage counselor, savvy problem solver, and even gallows humorist, Kingma looks straight into the predicaments so many of us face. She then offers ten deceptively simple yet profoundly effective strategies for coping on practical, emotional, and spiritual levels.

The devastating events cannot be changed, but after reading this book, you will be, having recovered a sense of equanimity, spirit, and strength. Whether you’re struggling with money issues, job loss, relationship problems, an unexpected health crisis, or all of the above, this book will light your path and heal your heart.

FROM THE INTRODUCTION:

It seems like everyone’s dealing with not just one hardship but a whole stack of them--the wife who left without notice and the house that burned down, the catastrophic illness and the job loss, the autistic child and the dead transmission and the $600 vet bill for the dog’s torn toenail.

I was reminded once again of how things seem to be stacking up for everybody when I ran into my friend, Julia, who was looking a little harried as she stood in line at Geneen''s, our local coffee bar. When I asked her how she was she said, “fine. “Aside from the fact that my entire life is out of control.” She ordered a latte, then went on to say that her boyfriend of six years had just announced that he''d fallen in love with another woman. Her landlord had given her a 30-day notice, because his son, after living in Europe for three years, had just returned to the U.S. and his father would be needing her apartment for him. Her job as a school librarian was being axed as a consequence of educational budget cuts; she''d caught her fourteen year old daughter smoking dope and her eighty-three year old mother just had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s--a week before Julia was going to send her daughter to live with her so the purple-haired girl could get a taste of some good old fashioned stability. “I feel like Job-ette,” Julia quipped. “I feel picked-on, overwhelmed, and exhausted. I think I’m coping. But I keep wondering if there’s any meaning to all this. And the worst thing is, sometimes I feel like a terrible person, as if somehow I should have been able to avoid all this.”

Julia isn''t the only person who''s feeling that things she once knew how to manage have somehow gotten wildly out of control and, along with it, the sense that she ought to be able to “get a grip,” and bring them back into alignment. In her book, The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion talks about the time in her life when her husband died suddenly of a heart attack, and, almost simultaneously, her daughter became desperately ill. For the first time, she said, she realized that having the right connections and the right credit cards couldn''t solve the problem.

How do we mend our hearts after loss? How can we cope? Carry on? Begin again? What can you do when your wife walks out? Your child dies? Your husband takes you to custody court and “buys” the right to move your children six states away? How can you keep on reaching for your dreams when your efforts keep coming to naught? When you come back shattered from a war? When every cent you squirreled away has vanished in WallStreetspeak and cybersmoke and at age sixty-four with a PhD you find yourself, weirdly, applying for a job as paint consultant at the Ace Hardware Store?

More than ever before, we’re in the soup together. We’re all trying desperately to cope with a pile of problems. And yet, no matter how many other people are going through it, it still hurts when it’s happening to you.

This book is about those times when what’s going on in your life feels so overwhelmingly difficult that you want to give up. As a result of being emotionally, financially, and circumstantially taxed to the max, you’ve reached the point where it feels like you can no longer cope. On an emotional level you wonder how you’ll make it through all the terrible feelings--grief, loss, sadness, despair. From a deeper spiritual intelligence you find yourself asking, how I can deal with what’s happening to me in a better way? And what is the meaning of all this?

Every life has such seasons. But now, more than ever, we''re seeing them not only in ourselves, but because of hugely encompassing natural and financial catastrophes reflected also in vast numbers of people around us. Some people think that astrologers or psychics can foresee such events, map them out for you, tie their timing to the stars or your past life actions. But the truth is that, no matter what their supposed origins, none of us escapes such things. Loss, heartache, tragedy, strings of difficult events that leave you breathless with confusion, terrified about the future, hating your life and wondering about the meaning of it all are warp and weft of the fabric of the human condition. No matter what your birth sign, the color of your hair, your nationality of origin, net taxable income, or the acts of your one or a thousand past lives, no one is exempt. So long as there are people on earth, such things will continue to occur.


That’s because, as well as being the proverbial bowl of cherries, life is also a bowl of pits. Pits are hard to swallow, indigestible, difficult to understand the meaning of until you plant them, watch them grow new trees, and harvest the fruit. Life holds, as well as innumerable blessings, beauties and moments of mystery and grandeur, sequences of loss, tragedies that shock us, test our mettle and leave us wondering about our sanity and whether there''s any design whatsoever or guiding hand in the universe to lead us through the thickets of anguish to the greener pastures of emotional tranquility and spiritual ease.