Glad No Matter What: Transforming Loss and Change Into Gift and Opportunity

The author of Glad No Matter What: Transforming Loss and Change into Gift and Opportunity, SARK (Susan Ariel Rainbow Kennedy) has inspired millions of readers to achieve their dreams (professionally and privately), the deaths of her mother and cat and the end of a treasured relationship tested her ability to walk her talk. But as Glad No Matter What shows, she journeyed through the spirals and layers of grief and loss and emerged stronger and more whole.

In this inspiring book, she shares the insights she found along the way — practical strategies we can all use to cultivate profound, positive transformation through, rather than despite, life’s inevitable travails.

Anyone who has ever loved and lost understands that it takes a great deal of courage to keep going.  The “injured” simply have a hard time putting themselves back on the playing field – after all, what if they get hit again?!?!  Glad No Matter What: Transforming Loss and Change into Gift and Opportunity proves that it can be done, should be done, and…. well, must be done.

About Susan Ariel Rainbow Kennedy – SARK

SARK (Susan Ariel Rainbow Kennedy) is a bestselling author and artist, with over sixteen books in print and well over two million books sold, including the national bestsellers Succulent Wild Woman, Bodacious Book of Succulence, Eat Mangoes Naked, Prosperity Pie, and Fabulous Friendship Festival. Her work is widely used by colleges and universities as required reading and course material and she is a distinguished contributor to magazines and periodicals. SARK is one of the featured trailblazers in the critically acclaimed PBS Series Women of Wisdom and Power. An acclaimed speaker and teacher, she has been leading workshops for over twenty years. She is a transformational role model offering inspiration and guidance to people in their process of living more powerfully and authentically, and being more actively creative on a daily basis. SARK is also the founder and CEO of Planet SARK, a thriving business that creates products and services to support empowered living. She lives in San Francisco.

Questions and Answers with SARK:

In what specific ways can we all be more glad?
Feel what you feel when you feel it, then let it go. This will open the channels for more gladness. Look for things to be glad about, and talk about them, write them down, celebrate them. This will call more gladness to you. Make your most “alive choices” which are the ones that are a little scary, or make you a little nervous. These are the things that will fill your soul, and in turn fill the soul of the world. Do you transformative practices, which means taking whatever happens, and finding new ways to respond, and continue to practice. Telling and living new stories. This means that you stop repeating and reliving negative incidents, and instead focus on retelling the great and good things. This will cause and create more goodness and gladness.

Why this book now?
We are all seeking better ways to live and love our lives and assist the world in being a more creative, nourishing, and glad place. This book demonstrates how I do that, and gives powerful stories and examples of how you can do that. Here are a few examples: Facing a 3 hour flight delay, I built a fort in the airport. Being at the DMV with a lot of unhappy people, I stood up and sang Amazing Grace. Hearing that I was being audited, I transformed fear and worry into a great exchange with the IRS agent who cried because she said no one had ever been that kind to her.

What was your biggest inspiration for writing this book?
The deaths of my mother and cat, and the end of a romantic relationship formed the initial reason for writing the book, but transformation is always my greatest inspiration, and how we can literally “change the form” of what happens to us and what we do with that, is the basis of this book. All of my changes and losses have been transformed into gifts and opportunities, and those gifts and opportunities create more goodness and gladness to share with the world.

Can one really be glad “no matter what”?
Yes. By finding the glad parts of WHATever happens, and doing our transformational practices. We will still feel all of our feelings, we will just be invited not to spend so much time there. By feeling what we feel when we feel it, we can learn to better hold multiple feelings, and find the glad parts in as many of them as possible.

What will being glad really Do for people?
It fills them from the inside, so that they become and live like “full cups of self-love and gladness” sharing the overflow with the world.

“Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive and then go do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” – Dr. Howard Thurman

It’d be easy to say that Glad No Matter What is about taking lemons and making lemonade.  But, that wouldn’t be quite accurate.  After all, if the lemons become lemonade, they’re no longer lemons, are they?  Glad No Matter What is more about taking lemons and making them dance.

Read more about Glad No Matter What: Transforming Loss and Change into Gift and Opportunity. Click through and use Amazon’s outstanding “Search inside this book” feature. You’ll be able to see for yourself, that this is a very lighthearted, fun, and upbeat book. It’s delightfully different and refreshing and I think you’ll be all kinds of crazy about it.