Part I: Not in along time has a book touched my life more or shown up @ a more perfect time. The Ten Things to Do When Your Life Falls Apart (10 Things), by author Daphne Rose Kingma is just that book! I had an opportunity to interview her about her book, her beliefs, & her future.
SIU: You generally write books on relationships, what made you write 10 Things?
Kingma: As you may know, I've written a dozen books specifically about love and relationships, among them the best-sellers, COMING APART
, TRUE LOVE
, FINDING TRUE LOVE
, and THE FUTURE OF LOVE
,. In these books I've dealt most often with love as we experience it in our intimate human connections and how, through becoming more conscious of our behavior, we can experience a greater measure of love in our relationships.THE TEN 
is different in that it is very specifically about how to make it through a crisis. There's obviously a bridge here, though, because even in a crisis we are concerned about our relationships, and our relationships are often profoundly affected by challenges that we are dealing with. What is also true is that no matter what we're going through,our anguish is ultimately resolved through love. Since crisis rocks us to the depth of our need and vulnerability, it also calls us to greater and greater measures of love.SIU: How do you feel one's beliefs and/or faith comes into play during a crisis?
Kingma: Ultimately any life crisis is an invitation to get in touch with our spiritual dimension--whatever you choose to call it: soul, light, divinity, eternal essence, love. A spiritual grounding, practice or point of view enables us to see a crisis in a larger framework--one that suggests that we might learn from the difficulties we are going through, that we might be transformed as persons and as souls. This spiritual viewpoint also brings us comfort--we begin to understand that there is meaning to even our difficult experiences and that life itself, and we ourselves are larger than the hard times we are having.
SIU: What helps you through during crisis in your own life?
Kingma: I have been greatly blessed in my life by knowing early on that there is a greater dimension in which all of our experiences are occurring. This deeply held awareness has cradled me through the crisis in my own life--and I've certainly had my share: ended relationships, my house burning down, the death of dear ones, financial reversals and health challenges. While each of these things was huge and on a number of occasions several of them occurred in tandem with each other,I always knew that there was a greater force at work. As a consequence, I was open to seeing--and, ultimately, to actually experiencing--what the greater gifts of these tough experiences would be.
Please revisit for Part II of my chat with Author, Daphne Rose Kingma!
