When the Heart Breaks

Living Through Heartbreak and Renewal

If you never knew disappointment, would you ever grow? If you had never felt loss, could you have compassion for another? Without real heartache, would you ever know the greatness of love? On When the Heart Breaks, David Whyte invites you to join him in an investigation of a question that rests at the center of human experience. With a poet's insight into the landscape of the soul, he offers a deeply moving exploration of how we experience love and loss, and how with resilience and time we can rise again each time we are broken.

“No human being has ever lived without knowing heartbreak,” David Whyte tells us. “And to accept that truth is to give a merciful gift to ourselves.” As David reveals, so often our hearts break because the love we offer—whether to a partner, a friend, a child, or a place—is not returned to us in the same way. Yet if we retreat from experience of unrequited love, he says, we miss the opportunity to discover the countless invisible ways that the world offers us its love in return, often unlooked for and unrecognized.

Understanding heartbreak, says David Whyte, helps us to develop a more beautiful mind—a mind that embraces the hidden riches of life. We learn to apprentice ourselves to the great and small difficulties that test the edges of our identity and lead us into greater and greater understanding. With words to inspire laughter, courage, and deep reflection, David Whyte invites you to join him in the great conversation that takes us into the exquisite vulnerability of the unknown—the way a heartbreak can make us more humble, more aware, and expand our ability to love.