Grateful: a Heart Wide Open

What does it mean to keep your heart open… wide open… in a world that seems to enjoy trying to shut you down?Consider what it means to stand in the wreckage of what was… relationships that broke, roles that confined, the various versions of yourself you were told to be – yet knew you aren’t… and through it all you’re still able to whisper, “Thank you.”That doesn’t mean being Grateful: A Heart Wide Open is surface-level gratitude. These stories aren’t the “positive vibes only” stories or shiny declarations that ignore the truth of pain. No… this book is about the real gratitude – the kind that often shows up after the storm… after the breakdown… after the moments when leaving felt like the only way to stop the pain.It’s about the choice to keep living… to keep loving… to keep risking tenderness, even after life gave you every reason to grow cold and build walls.The authors in these pages have experienced betrayal, grief, disillusionment, invisibility, trauma, silence, even stood at the edge of the abyss. They’ve also experienced moments of reckoning, of truth, of grace. They actively chose not to stay numb. Instead, they allowed themselves to feel it all… and wrote from that sacred – vulnerable – space. They said: “Yes, I’ve been hurt… but I’m still here. I am grateful… not because it didn’t happen – but because I’m still becoming.”