In her own words...

Reading is my salvation. I absorb books. They have changed my life, helped me heal and directed me in new directions.

When I read something truly inspiring or helpful in my growth, I write the words down. I have at least two notebooks filled with the words that have changed my spirit for the better.

Recently, I read a book that validated and clarified what my spirit has been whispering to my heart for years. This book gave me strength to do what I needed to do -- to leave my husband and begin a new life on my own.

The book is called, "Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow" by Elizabeth Lesser.

Here are just a few sentences, from the first 50 pages of this 300-page book, that had a profound effect on the current direction in my life:

In talking about fearlessness, Elizabeth Lesser quotes the Buddhist teacher Chogyam Trungpa:
"Going beyond fear begins when we examine our fear: our anxiety, nervousness, concern and restlessness. If we look into our fear, if we look beneath the veneer, the first thing we find is sadness, beneath the nervousness. Nervousness is crank up, vibrating all the time. When we slow down, when we relax with our fear, we find sadness, which is calm and gentle. Sadness hits you in your heart, and your body produces a tear. Before you cry, there is a feeling in your chest and then, after that, you produce tears in your eyes. You are about to produce rain or a waterfall in your eyes and you feel sad and lonely and perhaps romantic at the same time. This is the first tip of fearlessness, and the first sign of real warriorship. You might think that, when you experience fearlessness, you will hear the opening to Beethoven's Fifth Symphony or see a great explosion in the sky, but it doesn't happen that way. Discovering fearlessness comes from working with the softness of the human heart."

And I loved what she said about loneliness:

"The great loneliness - like the loneliness a caterpillar endures when she wraps herself in a silky shroud and begins the long transformation from chrysalis to butterfly. It seems that we too must go through such a time, when life as we have known it is over - when being a caterpillar feels somehow false and yet we don't know who we are supposed to become. All we know is that something bigger is calling us to change. And though we must make the journey alone, and even if suffering is our only companion, soon enough we will become a butterfly, soon enough we will taste the rapture of being alive."

"What is keeping you from feeling the rapture? I can assure you, you won't find the answer in a lighted room. What stands between you and a full-bodied life can be found only in the shadows. What wants to live in you may be waiting - as it was for me - at the end of a long loneliness."