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The Spiritual Journey
In Into the Flow, you share an open account of your search for spiritual freedom throughout decades of grief, Catholic certainty, marriage, work, money, divorce, and desire. Why was this an important book for you to write?
I wanted to write the book I couldn’t find when my life split open; I was drowning in the questions, and suddenly couldn’t seem to relate to anyone or anything around me, including my old self.
There were plenty of books out there offering help. Self-help. Psychology. Spirituality. Many made big promises. (You name it, I read it!) There were also great novels to get lost in. I was devouring all of the above, but what I craved was the best of both worlds: a story with one continuous narrative arc about someone on a spiritual journey, but that was grounded, honest, and realistic.
I wanted a book that told the truth about spiritual awakening. What does it really look like when your life falls apart and you start rethinking everything: your beliefs, identity, career, marriage, and all your old notions of success? Where was the book that portrayed the seeker who’s not only wrestling with the questions but trying to embody those new revelations through the messy realities of grief, money, and day-to-day life? I wanted the book that would have made me feel less alone in my journey: the confusion, absurdity, missteps, and especially the humor. Because life is pretty ridiculous, so let’s all have a laugh about it, you know?
Anyway… I couldn’t find that book, so I wrote it!
What was the most challenging part of revisiting your experiences on the page?
At first, lawd, it was just getting the experiences down in whatever form I could!
In the very beginning, I decided the easiest way for me to start this monster was to send myself emails. I literally created a brand new email account dedicated solely to this endeavor of seeing what sorts of things wanted to emerge. I’d set aside an hour, sometimes less, sometimes more, open a blank compose-email screen, and write. Some of the stories were funny, and I laughed my way through writing them. Some were gut-wrenching. Some made no sense at all. I didn’t judge or censor, and I definitely didn’t tell myself I was writing a book. I was simply allowing creation… and it was arguably the most fun part of the process. No pressure or expectations—just the joy of it.
Then came the larger challenge: How do I wrangle all these random, disparate stories into one cohesive narrative? Gah! And how do I find a voice that can hold both humor and depth?
That took years to nail down.
But, looking back, wow: what an amazing, totally mind-blowing thing the creative process is.
You write openly about the desire to be rescued by something outside ourselves. Why do you think that longing is so universal?
I’ve given this one a lot of thought over the years. Many psychologists and spiritual teachers talk about this “oceanic feeling” we have as infants, where we don’t experience ourselves as separate from everything around us. There’s just… this sense of oneness.
As we grow and develop, a story of “me” starts to come online. (In Western cultures arguably even more than others.) We start to see ourselves as separate individuals with our own identities, and personalities. We develop our own particular brand of fears, defenses, and conditioning. This separation is a completely natural and necessary part of being human.
However, my personal take is that the moment we start to experience ourselves as separate, there also begins a longing for that deeper sense of connection we remember.
Many call this the wound of separation.
And so begins the journey of seeking that connection, that love, outside of ourselves: parental approval, societal approval. If we are raised religious: approval from the God-man-in-the-sky. We start to associate safety with achievement, performance, certainty, beliefs, roles, money, success, or simply staying so busy and numb we no longer feel the longing and discontent anymore. With childhood trauma, often this seeking and suffering is even more magnified.
Over time, we get further and further from our inner knowing.
For me, the spiritual journey – call it awakening, self-actualization, individuation, whatever term you prefer – is about getting back to that inner knowing. Slowly peeling back all the fears, defenses, and patterns we’ve accumulated so we can remember who we really are and reconnect with the deeper wisdom, wholeness, and aliveness that was there all along but just maybe got buried for a while.
From that place, in my experience, we can start partnering with life differently. Instead of trying to force life to conform to our perfect little script, we begin trusting its twists and turns a little more. We fight with reality a little less.
Personally, the more I’ve trusted life, the more I’ve come to see that life really isn’t something “out there” happening to me… I am life, and life is me. It’s all one unfolding. Life on Earth may drive me absolutely bonkers sometimes—Christ on a bike, the endless minutiae!—but there’s an intelligence there that’s often a lot smarter than I am. I’ve found I’m much better off partnering with it than resisting it. Life always wins anyway. Ha!
That said, please: we’re human. We’re going to lose our footing. Maybe we just get a little better at returning to ourselves when we wobble. As they say in yoga, the master isn’t the one who holds the perfect pose uninterrupted. She’s the one who knows how to return to the pose after falling out of it… and learns to laugh more at the absurdity of it all.
What does living “in the flow” look like for you today?
Great question! I’ll answer with a story.
Seven years ago or so, I kept hitting obstacles trying to publish this book. None of the various next steps felt right. I just couldn’t find the spark needed to take this book across the finish line, and I was deeply discouraged by this. After all that work… now just… nothing?
Then one day, on a winter trip to San Pancho, Mexico, still feeling lost around the whole thing, my partner Greg looked at me and asked, “What would we do right now if we weren’t afraid?”
Five months later, I’d put the book on ice, we’d sold our house in DC, our cars, and just about everything we owned… and spent the next six-plus years vagabonding around the planet while working remotely. Definitely NOT the original plan, but best detour ever.
Then COVID hit while we were in the middle of the Atacama Desert in Chile.
We scrambled onto one of the last flights back to the States, canceled six months of travel plans, and ended up wandering around the U.S. until the world reopened. One of those unexpected detours led us to Asheville, North Carolina, which eventually became our home… and where it finally felt right to bring this book across the finish line.
Absolutely none of it was part of the plan.
That’s what living in flow means to me now. Not the shiny Instagram version where everyone’s perfectly aligned and somehow has amazing lighting 24/7, but the kind with uncertainty, frustration, plot twists… where life has its own timeline.
For me, it’s about listening inward while also learning to partner with life. Taking ownership of the choices that are mine to make, but letting go of the illusion that I have to control every outcome. More often than not, I’ve found that life has much better ideas than I do. Or as Byron Katie writes, “Let life live you. It does anyway.” Maybe easier said than done sometimes! But it rings true to me.
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What would you let go of to be free—to live a life that feels truly yours?
When loss and burnout upend her life, Kathleen Branigan launches a quest for truth . . . and ends up with an existential crisis. She questions her Catholic faith, devours self-help books, goes skydiving, earns a master’s in religious studies, and ventures into the Amazon for five back-to-back nights of ayahuasca.
Into the Flow is a funny, soul-baring memoir for anyone seeking answers to life’s Big Questions, healing from heartbreak, or craving deeper purpose when the old maps stop working. Through encounters with spiritual teachers and therapists, plus a few wild adventures, Kathleen discovers what she’s looking for isn’t found in miracle cures or endless self-improvement, but in trusting herself again.
If you’re navigating fear, uncertainty, awakening, or reinvention, Into the Flow offers laughter, honesty, and a reminder: freedom emerges when you stop the search and start creating a life that’s your own.
Finding Order in Disorder
Finding Order in Disorder is Ishaa Vinod Chopra’s candid account of living with bipolar disorder while moving through fractured family relationships, immigration, an abusive marriage, repeated hospitalizations, divorce, education, and artistic discovery. The memoir follows her from childhood in India through periods in Canada and Germany, showing how instability, rejection, trauma, and mental illness became intertwined. Chopra writes with unusual openness about manic episodes, medication, institutional treatment, domestic violence, and the difficult work of separating a person’s character from symptoms of an illness.
The book’s most compelling quality is its emotional directness. Chopra doesn’t shape her experiences into a tidy recovery story. Instead, she revisits painful decisions, acknowledges her own mistakes, and allows conflicting feelings about her parents, former partners, doctors, and caregivers to remain visible. Interviews, remembered conversations, personal reflections, and drawings created during episodes give the memoir the feeling of a life being examined from several angles. Her voice is earnest and conversational, and even when she moves into advice or philosophy, the ideas remain rooted in experiences she’s actually lived.
Dance provides the book with its strongest unifying thread. Kathak, Latin dance, painting, yoga, teaching, and performance become ways for Chopra to regulate emotion, preserve identity, and reconnect with herself when illness threatens to define her. Her work with children offers another source of meaning, particularly as she considers how early experiences shape adult well-being. The later chapters become increasingly reflective and practical, addressing sleep, medication, counselling, self-respect, relationships, stigma, and patient autonomy. This shift gives the memoir the character of both a personal testimony and a compassionate conversation with readers facing similar challenges.
This book will resonate most with people living with bipolar disorder, survivors of domestic abuse, and families trying to understand the complicated realities of caregiving. It should also appeal to mental health professionals, educators, and readers interested in how art can support recovery and self-expression. Chopra’s story asks readers to look beyond a diagnosis and see a whole person who can be vulnerable, impulsive, loving, creative, difficult, hopeful, and resilient at the same time. It’s a deeply personal invitation to approach mental illness with greater patience, curiosity, and humanity.
Pages: 190 | ASIN : B0BYZJDZ68
Into the Flow: A Journey to Freedom by Trying It All
Into the Flow follows Kathleen Branigan through a long, searching passage from inherited faith into lived spiritual freedom. What begins with her mother’s cancer diagnosis becomes a decades-spanning reckoning with grief, Catholic certainty, marriage, work, money, divorce, desire, embodiment, and the stubborn human wish to be saved by something outside ourselves. Branigan tries nearly everything: meditation, graduate study, coaching, therapy, dating, retreats, ayahuasca in the Amazon, and the ordinary humiliations of trying to build a life while one’s inner world is being remodeled. The book’s true subject, though, is not the catalog of experiences. It’s the gradual discovery that freedom is less an escape hatch than a way of inhabiting the life already here.
The scenes with her mother are especially affecting, from the absurd eruption of “Jimmy crack corn” during illness to the tender, almost unbearably intimate moment when her mother’s final request is simply, “Be free.” Branigan has a gift for puncturing solemnity at the exact second it threatens to become too polished. Painting her mother’s toenails candy apple red after death, fleeing corporate suffocation by way of a conga line, or wrestling with grief while trying to remain a “happy” spiritual person all feel vividly, painfully human. Her prose moves quickly, sometimes breathlessly, with a voice that is funny, self-skewering, and emotionally exposed. The comic asides crowd the quieter revelations, but the abundance is also part of the book’s charm. It feels like a mind and heart thinking aloud before they’ve had the chance to launder the mess out of the truth.
What stayed with me most was the book’s insistence that spiritual insight isn’t a bypass around suffering. Branigan is sharp about the seduction of spiritual performance, the way “trust the universe” can become another costume for control. Her ideas about grief, identity, and freedom deepen as the book moves forward, especially when she recognizes that pain isn’t evidence of failure and that emotion can become a kind of inner compass. I didn’t agree with every metaphysical leap, but I respected the sincerity of the inquiry. Branigan doesn’t present awakening as a clean arrival. She presents it as awkward, embodied, expensive, funny, lonely, and occasionally ridiculous. That honesty gives the book its weight.
Into the Flow feels less like a manual for transformation than a candid record of one woman learning to stop outsourcing her own life. I closed it with admiration for its emotional courage, its unruly humor, and its willingness to let freedom mean something more demanding than happiness. This is a good book for reflective readers, seekers in transition, people grieving an old identity, and anyone who has ever tried very hard to become whole before realizing they were never quite as broken as they feared.
Pages: 256 | ASIN : B0FWZXZ7QT
You Are Not Broken
The Split gives voice to women who have faced pain, loss, the dissolution of their marriages, and challenges of long-held beliefs. Why was this an important book for you to write?
This book wanted to be written. Another collaborative book was not in my plans and yet, the idea came to me in a moment of frustration as I heard yet another person reference families of divorce as ‘broken’. I pushed it off and the idea wouldn’t let go, so I knew it needed to be shared. The women I know that have gone through divorce are not ‘broken’ and neither are their families. As we discuss in the book, something is arguable broken before divorce happens. Divorce is the and the answer to a problem where no other solution has worked. Letting women know that the end of a marriage or relationship is not the end of the story, simply the end of a chapter is extremely empowering. Having gone through divorce mostly alone, I know the power of having a group of women guide you in the process is priceless.
With so many authors involved in the making of The Split, I would imagine the collaboration process was complex. Can you share with us a little about the writing process?
Surprisingly, it was more difficult getting women to join the book than it was to have them write! So many women that were interested in writing self selected out before the process really began. To choose to share a story, especially one as raw as divorce, one has to be ready to share. You want to share what you’ve learned along the way and if you’re not quite there yet, the story simply won’t come. Being ready was the most challenging part. Once the women said they were in, the writing happened and the deadlines were (mostly) met without much fuss. The Split is now a beacon in the dark for those that need it.
Did you learn anything about yourself while putting this book together?
I learned the seeds of my divorce (and so many others) were planted long before marriage was even a consideration. From a young age, our families of origin and society share a particular message of happiness, without providing a lot of room for curiosity. I realized that when I began to become seriously curious about my life and the future I wanted, I found out the story I had been told I wanted isn’t what I actually wanted.
What is one thing you hope readers take away from The Split?
I hope the readers understand that the idea of divorce is not one they need to explore alone. It can be a tough journey and I hope this book provides a guiding light and the authors in it become a part of the readers’ support system. I hope they connect with the authors that resonate with them the most and continue their healing journey.
Did you hear? They’re getting divorced.
We have a broken family.
We’ve all heard these phrases whispered in hushed tones—words laced with judgment, pity, or shame. But what if they’re wrong?
The Split: Tales of Family Renewal and Female Resiliencechallenges the narrative that divorce equals failure. These powerful, deeply personal stories reveal that splitting isn’t the breaking point—it’s the breakthrough. In these pages, women share how they reclaimed their voices, rebuilt their lives, and redefined what family, love, and strength can look like after endings that became beginnings.
This anthology dismantles generations of stigma around divorce and womanhood, replacing it with a message of renewal, courage, and collective healing. These are not broken women. They are bold, audacious, and resilient—choosing themselves, their peace, and a new path forward. Splitting isn’t the end; it’s a rebirth.
Contributors: Brandee Melcher, Dr. Katherine Humphreys, Carol Britton, Lesley Goth, PsyD, Carolina Cifuentes, Sierra Melcher, Christen E. Bryce, MS RN, Allison Banegas, Dr. Erica Anne Love, Summer Jean, LaToya Burdiss, and Jen Kennedy, MPA
The Split
The Split gathers the voices of women who faced the unraveling of marriages, families, identities, and long-held beliefs. Across these stories, the writers look directly at pain, loss, and the complicated paths toward freedom. Instead of treating divorce or separation as a collapse, the book reframes each ending as a turning point where women choose themselves, rebuild their lives, and honor the truth that wholeness can follow even the hardest breaks. By the final pages, the collection stitches together a message that is steady and hopeful. These women are not broken, and they are becoming something stronger.
Reading their words, I felt an ache in my chest more than once. The writing is striking in its honesty, and the stories breathe with real life. Brandee Melcher’s chapter opens with the raw confusion of childhood and grows into a powerful reclaiming of self, and her voice shook me because of how clear and grounded it becomes. Her journey from chaos to confidence made me root for her, and it reminded me how childhood patterns can shadow adulthood until we finally name them. I also found myself lingering on Sierra Melcher’s reflections on choosing peace over performance. Her reminder that children do not need perfect homes, they need healthy adults, resonated with me personally. The stories impact in different ways, but all of them bring a unique emotional punch.
Some chapters hit harder than others, and the shifts in tone from one writer to the next made the book feel unpredictable in a way I genuinely enjoyed. That variety gave the collection its energy. I especially appreciated the moments when the authors stepped back from the trauma and wrote about joy creeping in again. Those small wins felt huge. They made the book less about loss and more about rebuilding something real. At times, I wished a few stories went deeper into the “after” rather than the “during,” but even that unevenness felt honest. Healing rarely moves in a straight line, and the structure of the book mirrors that reality.
The Split would be a meaningful read for anyone standing at the edge of a major life change, especially women navigating separation, divorce, or the quiet breaking points that do not always have names. It would also help friends, partners, and professionals who want to understand what these experiences actually feel like from the inside. The book sits with the hard parts, and it also leaves space for light. I would gladly recommend it to anyone who needs a reminder that endings do not mean failure. They mean a new chapter is ready for you, and you get to decide what it becomes.
Pages: 144 | ASIN : B0G274WVFH
Deserving of Grace
Should Have Told You Sooner follows a museum professional navigating the complexities of motherhood, the aftermath of divorce, and a career opportunity that leads her abroad. Where did the idea for this novel come from?
The idea for Should Have Told You Sooner came to me while I was immersed in a book of Welsh folk tales. One story in particular, “The Lady of Llyn Y Fan Fach,” captivated me and set my imagination racing. In it, a young farmer named Gwyn visits the lake named in the title, and while he is there, a most beautiful fairy rises from the water and speaks to him. She is Nelferch, and in an instant, Gwyn is in love. Nelferch agrees to marry him, sacrificing the watery world she knows for a life with him on dry land, but their union ends in disappointment and pain. Long after finishing the story, I kept thinking about Nelferch and Gwyn and all the ways we might harm those we profess to love. It wasn’t long before I stopped thinking about the folk tale characters and began imagining a more contemporary pair.
What is one pivotal moment in the story that you think best defines Noel?
After Noel leaves a heart-to-heart talk with Henry, the young artist she’s been working with, she makes a side trip to an art museum instead of returning right back to work. Their conversation has shaken her – and I won’t say why because spoilers! – and as she’s walking through all the London neighborhoods that were her haunts while she was a student, both Henry’s words and her memories are running through her head, and she’s letting them. Until this moment, she’s been the person who put her memories in a box and closed the lid tight on them because the idea of revisiting that part of her life was too painful. I think it becomes clear here how hard it’s been for her to live with the memories and also how hard it’s been to live without acknowledging them, and not only for herself. She realizes something has to change.
Is there any moral or idea that you hope readers take away from the story?
I always hope my stories make readers think about how complex and flawed and yet deserving of grace we all are. That living is all about change and growth and doing the work that helps us heal both ourselves and our relationships with others.
What is the next book you are working on, and when will it be available?
I’m currently working on the sequel to Should Have Told You Sooner, and I have two other novel projects that are in early planning stages. If the sequel is finished within the year, it could be out as early as 2027.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Instagram | Website | Amazon
While studying art history at a London university, Noel Enfield falls passionately in love with aspiring artist and art school student Bryn Jones. Shortly after Bryn leaves for a five-month painting trip through Italy, Noel discovers she is pregnant. She is ecstatic and believes Bryn will be too—they have plans to marry, after all. But mishaps part the two lovers, and a desperate Noel makes a split-second choice to move forward in a way that will change not only her life but also the lives of everyone she loves.
Three decades later, when she is offered a six-month secondment to a London museum, Noel decides it’s time to prove she really has moved on from that difficult period by returning to the city where she met and lost Bryn. But rather than proving she has persevered, the move lands Noel in the thick of London’s insular art world, with only one or two degrees of separation from her past and the people she once loved. After she reconnects with an old, dear friend and learns finally what kept Bryn from returning to her all those years ago, the very underpinnings of her life are rocked to their core. Some decisions made in the past can never be put behind her, she realizes, and armed with this new understanding, she sets out on a journey to reclaim what—and who—she left behind.
Divorced at 50 F**K, Now What?
Lara Portelli’s Divorced at 50 is a raw and heartfelt memoir that begins with a stolen childhood, winds through a troubled marriage, and lands in the fragile yet powerful territory of self-discovery after divorce. She writes with candor about cultural expectations, coercive control, and the painful silence of a life lived for others. Yet, woven through the heartbreak is a strong thread of resilience. The book is both a personal story and a guide, filled with reflections, small lessons, and hard-won hope. At its heart, it is about reclaiming one’s voice after decades of suppression.
I found myself pulled into Lara’s honesty. She does not sugarcoat her experiences, and that makes her words feel alive. At times, I felt angry for her younger self, trapped in a world where duty outweighed love. Other times, I found myself smiling when she described small moments of joy, like driving with the window down or noticing a flower left on her desk. The writing is simple and unpretentious, but it carries a deep emotional weight. It often feels like sitting across from a friend who has decided to tell you the truth, even the parts that hurt. That vulnerability is what makes the book so powerful.
I also admired how she framed her journey not just as an escape, but as a rebuilding. She writes about health, self-worth, and the importance of surrounding yourself with the right people. Her focus on words and mindset gave the book an unexpected layer. Some sections lingered on personal analysis, but in a way, that rhythm mirrored her process of working through years of pain. It felt real, not polished for effect.
By the time I finished, I was left with both sadness for what she endured and hope for what she found. Divorced at 50 F**K, Now What? will resonate most with women who feel stuck, whether in a marriage, a job, or even a set of old beliefs. It’s also for anyone standing on the edge of change, afraid of what comes next. Lara shows that the unknown can be terrifying, yes, but it can also be the beginning of everything you’ve been waiting for.
Pages: 76 | ASIN : B0FLPL17MT
Life Is Lifey: The A to Z’s on Navigating Life’s Messy Middle
Sarah Shahi’s Life Is Lifey is a raw, funny, and unapologetic blend of memoir and advice that doesn’t pretend to have all the answers. The book weaves through her personal journey of divorce, self-discovery, and career pivots, while also doling out blunt yet compassionate lessons about courage, boundaries, aging, sex, self-love, and learning to actually live your own life rather than the one others expect. It feels less like a self-help manual and more like sitting down with a brutally honest big sister who mixes tequila shots with therapy sessions, making you laugh even as you cry.
Reading this book felt like an unexpected jolt of energy. Shahi’s writing is conversational, raunchy, and full of personality, which is what makes it so compelling. I loved how she knocked down the polished façade of self-help and leaned into the chaos instead. Her stories are sometimes shocking, sometimes tender, and always relatable. The honesty is refreshing. I found myself nodding, laughing, and pausing to underline lines that hit uncomfortably close to home. It doesn’t read like something written from a pedestal, and that made me trust her voice even more.
I enjoyed the boldness, but sometimes I wished the narrative slowed down so that certain insights could breathe. The profanity and sex-heavy sections might turn off some readers, but for me, that unfiltered edge is exactly what gives the book its charm. Shahi’s refusal to sand down her experiences into something polite is what makes it ring true. She is vulnerable without being sappy and hilarious without being flippant, which is a balance that not many writers can pull off.
Life Is Lifey isn’t for people who want a neat list of steps to fix their life. It’s for those who are tired of pretending everything is fine, who want to laugh through their tears, and who need a reminder that the second act of life can be wilder, richer, and more authentic than the first. If you’re someone who craves honesty laced with humor, and you’re not afraid of a little mess, this book will feel like a permission slip to live unapologetically and on your own terms.
Pages: 256 | ASIN : B0DYZZDKHG
