Extraordinary conversations and tools for getting through (not getting over) heartbreak, reclaiming what you lost along the way, and emerging awake, alive, and lit-up.
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Recovering from Faking It — with guest Cris Greer and host LiYana Silver
Season 1 · Episode 7
Wednesday, September 16, 2026 • Duration 51:55
From the outside, Cris had the perfect life: she’d married her high school sweetheart, they had a son, two cars, two dogs — even the literal white picket fence.
But honestly, Cris was faking it: her feelings, her conversations, even her orgasms.
In this episode, my longtime client Cris Greer and I look back at the Dark Night of the Soul that followed the end of her 17-year marriage: her husband’s alcoholism, becoming a single mother, and realizing just how much of her life she had spent holding it together — which also meant losing touch with herself.
In this episode, look and listen for:
When “holding it together” blocks you from knowing what you really feel and want
Reaching the point when staying is costing you — and your children — too much
What it takes to quit faking it — with friends, family, partnerships, s3x, and ourselves
Why the tiny victories during divorce — paying for something yourself, getting through a hard day, making one brave choice — deserve to be celebrated like hell
Knowing when letting your children see you struggle is too hard on them or when it can model something much healthier than pretending you’re fine
Learning the difference between your yes, your no, and your hell no — and honoring all three
If you’ve lost yourself inside a relationship, I’m excited for you to hear from Cris about what the Dark Night of Heartbreak asks of each of us:
To reclaim the brave, spirited, authentic young women we used to be — and to realize that trusting ourselves is 100% non-negotiable as we rebuild new lives and partnerships.
About Cris Greer
Cris Greer is a midlife guide, podcast host, and co-founder of My Happy Life Box — a monthly subscription box created together with her husband, Matthew. Together, they’ve built a business rooted in intention, connection, and the belief that women deserve care too.
Cris hosts the Grounding Journey Podcast, where she has honest, soulful conversations about growth, spirituality, and what it really means to move through midlife with grace and strength. Her work supports women navigating midlife, identity shifts, and the quiet (or not-so-quiet) question of “What’s next?”
Through her programs, curated boxes, and community, Cris offers simple, doable ways for women to reconnect with themselves — without overwhelm, guilt, or pressure to become someone new.
She believes midlife isn’t a crisis. It’s a recalibration. A remembering. A becoming.
When she’s not recording, writing, or curating the next box, you’ll find her dreaming up new ideas with Matthew, walking her dogs outside to clear her head, or reminding women everywhere that they are not behind — they’re right on time.
Relationship coach and author of Waking Up in The Dark Night of Divorce and Feminine Genius, LiYana works with women at the knife’s edge of heartbreak — reckoning with divorce, breakup, and heartbreak so complex it feels like a dark night of the soul.
LiYana guides women (and their partners) through (not around) the darkest passages of their lives. Through her transformational methodology, LiYana helps individuals, couples, and groups reclaim what they lost in the relationship, break repeating patterns, and emerge awake, aligned, and lit-up.
A former professional dancer and lover of painting with oils, LiYana lives in Asheville, NC with her son, their two cats, and a frankly impressive number of houseplants.
The Power of Crying-On-The-Bathroom-Floor Moments with guest Kelly Diels and host LiYana Silver
Season 1 · Episode 6
Monday, September 7, 2026 • Duration 57:38
Kelly and I — LiYana Silver, host of Waking Up in Heartbreak — talk about heartbreak, shame, and power: an exploration of what happens when a woman stops conforming to the script she was given and begins rebuilding from what is actually true.
In this episode, look and listen for:
Why heartbreak often precedes our most meaningful transformations.
How to stop asking "What's wrong with me?" and start seeing the bigger forces shaping our lives.
The hidden relationship between your shame, your power, and women's conditioning.
I love this hair-raising, heart-melting conversation about the power we can only retrieve from right smack in our crying-on-the-bathroom-floor moments.
I know you will too.
About Kelly Diels
Kelly Diels is a teacher of marketing, messaging, and business-building with a feminist lens.
For fifteen years, Kelly has been the strategist behind New York Times bestselling authors and the brands, books, and women you already follow. She is also Culture-Maker. Political theorist. Chief Marketing Officer.
Kelly doesn’t just theorise about winning the game when the game's rigged — she did it broke, with two toddlers and no job. And she’s forensically devoted to building a better f-ing way: for you, me, and for all of us.
I have been Kelly’s client. And years later, Kelly has been my client.
Kelly refers to doing transformational coaching with LiYana in this podcast episode, as instrumental in ‘unleashing’ her and the next phase of her work in the world. This is that work.
Stop Fighting Yourself
Season 1 · Episode 5
Monday, August 31, 2026 • Duration 34:20
Being hard on yourself doesn’t make you stronger. It severs you from the very strength you need to make it through the Dark Night of Heartbreak.
In this episode, I explore the inner war we wage with ourselves: criticizing, shaming, overriding, restricting, pushing, and trying to defeat the parts of ourselves we’ve decided are the problem.
Heartbreak has a way of bringing us face to face with this relationship. As painful as this reckoning can be, it offers us an extraordinary opportunity: to stop turning against ourselves. To trade brute force for passionate conviction, intimidation for intimacy, overriding for understanding, and combat for kindness.
In this episode, look and listen for:
How you stop fighting yourself.
Why your heartbreak brings you face to face with how you treat yourself and demands you reckon with it.
How the Excavation phase of a Dark Night of Heartbreak asks us to examine the beliefs, patterns, abandoned parts, crossed boundaries, and old stories that brought us here.
The most important relationship you’ll have in your entire life
As one of my mentors asked me, I ask you: when you are at war with yourself and you win… who loses?
Healing doesn't begin when we "rise from the ashes," but when we stop trying to avoid the fire. Welcome to this intimate, incendiary conversation with HeatherAsh Amara, mentor, land steward, philanthropist, and author of nine best-selling books, including Warrior Goddess Training.
Listen in, friend, as Ash and I talk about walking through fire, not around it, and how that remakes us into the person who emerges on the other side of the wreckage. As well as how our deepest losses can become invitations into a more intimate relationship with ourselves.
In this episode, look and listen for:
The simple choice that transformed Ash's divorce from devastation into initiation.
How Ash’s home and land was destroyed by wildfire, and what it taught her about presence, surrender, and staying with what cannot be saved.
The difference between learning from the past and punishing yourself with it.
The hidden agreements that heartbreak brings to the surface — including the belief, "I can't do this without them."
Why so many of us have been taught to make romantic partnership the center of our lives — and what becomes possible when we stop.
How to become the kind of person who can sit beside devastation without rushing to make it okay.
What it actually means to refuse to abandon yourself in the middle of heartbreak.
Consider that this impossible time in your life isn't asking you to be stronger but is simply asking you to stay.
About HeatherAsh Amara
Best-selling author, mentor, land steward, and philanthropist, HeatherAsh Amara has spent the last three decades guiding her many loyal readers through the challenging contradictions of modern life. Seamlessly weaving spiritual wisdom with proven, practical tools for individual growth, HeatherAsh is a dedicated steward in creating a more just, compassionate, and creative global community.
HeatherAsh has written nine books and created numerous audio projects, including the bestseller Warrior Goddess Training, with don Miguel Ruiz Jr., and her newest book
What I Said When She Called Me Sobbing
Season 1 · Episode 3
Monday, August 24, 2026 • Duration 29:29
A client called me recently at 1am, direct from a fiery, final breakup. Her message was soaked with inky, bottom-of-the-well despair.
What did I say to her? To her heartbreak? In her profound moment of loss? To help her make sense of her devastation — as well as past pain from her abandoning father that her devastation had resurfaced?
In this episode, look and listen for:
Exactly what I told that despairing, grieving, heartbroken client.
Why we all feel like our feelings might kill us.
Why resistance makes things worse.
How to resist the urge to fix, fight, or flee the most intense emotions that come up in heartbreak.
The phase of Dissolution: the second phase of the dark night of heartbreak, when things really start to fall apart; the most intense, acute phase.
How to know you’re in Dissolution, what to do when you are, and the 'medicine' this phase holds.
Why the phase of Dissolution is key to who you are becoming (on the other side of the ordeal).
What Now: resources and a practice, ‘Feel Without Fleeing’ to deepen and actualize this in your moment-to-moment life .
Resources:
Pre-order Waking Up in the Dark Night of Divorce and receive two beautiful book bonuses:
1) The Waking Up Workbook to accompany the book, with all the practices from the book plus space for you to write and draw; and
2) Book Club with LiYana: 3 weekly meetings in which I’ll read from the book, we’ll practice together, discuss, and have Q+A.
Breakthrough Session ("Metamorphosis"):In just a few hours together, using my elegant breakthrough methodology, we’ll transform that long-standing, hard-to-look-at pattern that’s been warping your sense of yourself and your relationships. Expect more to transform in a single session than in months with other modalities.
including on the first phase of Initiation, “Let This Heartbreak Remake You”, head to:
The Sacred Work of Falling Apart with Mirabai Starr
Season 1 · Episode 2
Thursday, August 20, 2026 • Duration 53:15
The Sacred Work of Falling Apart with host LiYana Silver & guest Mirabai Starr
What if the worst season of your life wasn't evidence that you've lost your way but an ancient passage that countless mystics have walked before you?
In this luminous and deeply personal conversation, Mirabai Starr, translator of Dark Night of the Soul and author of Ordinary Mysticism and I explore the Dark Night of the Soul: what it is, what it isn't, and why experiences like heartbreak, divorce, grief, and profound loss can become unexpected doorways into a more intimate relationship with ourselves, with love, and with what is sacred.
This is a conversation about surrender, soul, and the mysterious grace that sometimes arrives only after everything we thought would save us has fallen away.
In this episode, look and listen for:
What the mystics knew about heartbreak.
What the "Dark Night of the Soul" actually is and why it's far more than simply going through a hard time.
Why divorce can become one of life's deepest spiritual initiations, whether you left or were left.
The surprising difference between suffering that breaks us and suffering that transforms us.
The moment when the spiritual practices, beliefs, and certainties that once sustained us sometimes stop working, and why that's not failure.
Understanding grief not as weakness but as evidence of our capacity to love.
Why authenticity, not positivity, is the most healing companion during heartbreak.
Mirabai's own extraordinary story of love, loss, spiritual abuse, divorce, and the death of her daughter Jenny, and how those experiences reshaped her understanding of the sacred.
What the mystics mean when they say that something in us must die before something truer can be born.
Why there isn't just one dark night but many, and how each one invites us into a deeper intimacy with life.
I hope this conversation meets you in your own dark night of heartbreak, reminding you that you are not lost, even if everything familiar has fallen away.
Let This Heartbreak Remake You
Season 1 · Episode 1
Monday, August 17, 2026 • Duration 36:47
Welcome, friend, to the radical idea that shapes this entire podcast: Heartbreak isn’t just a breaking. It’s also an awakening. And a remaking.
When you're navigating divorce, separation, or the collapse of a dream you built your life around, you may feel completely lost. But, friend, you’re not lost. You are somewhere. You’re in one of life's most profound rites of passage: a dark night of heartbreak.
In this episode, look and listen for:
Why heartbreak is far more than the end of a relationship; how it can become a profound spiritual initiation.
A Dark Night of Heartbreak and it’s five phases, each that carry you from falling apart to emerging more fully awake, aligned, and lit-up.
The first phase, Initiation: how you know you’re in it, what to do when you are, and the ‘medicine’ hidden inside it.
My own dark night of heartbreak, journeying through illness and divorce, guided by my own inner nightlight.
Three simple practices to help you resist trying to “get over,” “move on,” or just endure your ordeal, but instead to let this heartbreak remake you.
Resources:
Pre-order Waking Up in the Dark Night of Divorce and receive two beautiful book bonuses:
1) The Waking Up Workbook to accompany the book, with all the practices from the book plus space for you to write and draw; and
2) Book Club with LiYana: 3 weekly meetings in which I’ll read from the book, we’ll practice together, discuss, and have Q+A.
The Heartbreak Transformation Map: a free guide clarifying why relationship loss feels so hard — and the five phases that help you through it.
This map guides you through:
The five phases of a Dark Night of Heartbreak
What each phase is helping you learn, unlearn, and transform
, head to:
In We Go: Podcast Trailer with host LiYana Silver
Season 1
Monday, July 13, 2026 • Duration 03:03
Welcome to Waking Up in Heartbreak.
I suspect three things about you, if you’re here at a podcast titled Waking Up in Heartbreak:
Your heart is shredded. Your identity is dissolving. What you’re going through is so intense and complex it feels like a dark night of the soul.
Yes, you want relief. You want to be on the other side, glowing and confident. And you will. But something in you says, stay here for a spell: there’s something here in the very parts you’re tempted to skip over, that’s key to who you’re becoming. Who you become as you do the work of not skipping over, IS who helps you emerge.
There is an impulse, an indomitable strength or inner fire in you -- even if it feels faint at the moment -- that won’t let up until you are more fully awake, lit-up, fully yourself.
I think it’s precisely what led you here. Welcome.
I’m LiYana Silver, author of Waking Up in the Dark Night of Divorce and Feminine Genius. I’ve been a relationship coach for nearly 25 years, guiding women (and their partners) through deep transformation, all the way through heartbreak to rebuilding lives and loves that are unapologetically alive, beautiful, meaningful.
Here’s what we need to talk about:
How to get through (but not bypass) the hardest parts
Why losing yourself in relationships, especially for women, is not an accident but by design.
The inner work of reclaiming yourself that has to happen before you rebuild your life.
Trusting yourself (again), being good to yourself, and being as big and bright as you truly are
I know, this divorce or breakup feels like a failure, but it’s an initiation.
I know you might feel all is lost. Or you are lost. But you are somewhere: in one of life’s most potent rites of passage.
So come in close. Grab a soft blanket and warm beverage.
1) The Waking Up Workbook to accompany the book, with all the practices from the book plus space for you to write and draw; and
2) Book Club with LiYana: 3 weekly meetings in which I’ll read from the book, we’ll practice together, discuss, and have Q+A.
Order Waking Up in the Dark Night of Divorce + book bonuses:
About LiYana Silver
Relationship coach and author of Waking Up in The Dark Night of Divorce and Feminine Genius, LiYana works with women at the knife’s edge of heartbreak — reckoning with divorce, breakup, and heartbreak so complex it feels like a dark night of the soul.
LiYana guides women (and their partners) through (not around) the darkest passages of their lives. Through her transformational methodology, LiYana helps individuals, couples, and groups reclaim what they lost in the relationship, break repeating patterns, and emerge awake, aligned, and lit-up.
A former professional dancer and lover of painting with oils, LiYana lives in Asheville, NC with her son, their two cats, and a frankly impressive number of houseplants.
Relationship coach and author of Waking Up in The Dark Night of Divorce and Feminine Genius, LiYana works with women at the knife’s edge of heartbreak — reckoning with divorce, breakup, and heartbreak so complex it feels like a dark night of the soul.
LiYana guides women (and their partners) through (not around) the darkest passages of their lives. Through her transformational methodology, LiYana helps individuals, couples, and groups reclaim what they lost in the relationship, break repeating patterns, and emerge awake, aligned, and lit-up.
A former professional dancer and lover of painting with oils, LiYana lives in Asheville, NC with her son, their two cats, and a frankly impressive number of houseplants.
The Seven Secrets to Healthy, Happy Relationships
Wild, Willing, Wise: An Interactive Guide for When to Paddle, When to Rest, and When to Jump Naked into the River of Life.
When she’s home, HeatherAsh plants her feet in New Mexico, but as a lifelong nomad, she spends much of her time traveling, teaching, and writing in cafés around the world.
When you pre-order, you’ll receive two beautiful book bonuses:
1) The Waking Up Workbook to accompany the book, with all the practices from the book plus space for you to write and draw; and
2) Book Club with LiYana: 3 weekly meetings in which I’ll read from the book, we’ll practice together, discuss, and have Q+A.
Order Waking Up in the Dark Night of Divorce + book bonuses: liyanasilver.com/wakingup
About LiYana Silver
Relationship coach and author of Waking Up in The Dark Night of Divorce and Feminine Genius, LiYana works with women at the knife’s edge of heartbreak — reckoning with divorce, breakup, and heartbreak so complex it feels like a dark night of the soul.
LiYana guides women (and their partners) through (not around) the darkest passages of their lives. Through her transformational methodology, LiYana helps individuals, couples, and groups reclaim what they lost in the relationship, break repeating patterns, and emerge awake, aligned, and lit-up.
A former professional dancer and lover of painting with oils, LiYana lives in Asheville, NC with her son, their two cats, and a frankly impressive number of houseplants.
Relationship coach and author of Waking Up in The Dark Night of Divorce and Feminine Genius, LiYana works with women at the knife’s edge of heartbreak — reckoning with divorce, breakup, and heartbreak so complex it feels like a dark night of the soul.
For over 24 years, LiYana has guided women (and their partners) through (not around) the darkest passages of their lives. Through her transformational methodology, LiYana helps individuals, couples, and groups reclaim what they lost in the relationship, break repeating patterns, and emerge awake, aligned, and lit-up.
A former professional dancer and lover of painting with oils, LiYana lives in Asheville, NC with her son, their two cats, and a frankly impressive number of houseplants.
Sometimes the deepest transformation begins precisely where certainty ends.
About Mirabai Starr
Mirabai Starr is an award-winning author, internationally acclaimed speaker, and interspiritual teacher. In 2020, she was honored on Watkins’ list of the 100 Most Spiritually Influential Living People. Drawing from 20 years of teaching Philosophy and World Religions and a lifetime of practice, Mirabai shares her wisdom worldwide on contemplative living, writing as a spiritual practice, and the transformational power of grief and loss.
Mirabai has authored over a dozen books including Wild Mercy, Caravan of No Despair, and renowned translations of sacred literature, including Dark Night of the Soul. Her most recent book, Ordinary Mysticism, has been praised by Anne Lamott as “a gorgeous, transformative, welcoming book is for anyone who longs to feel more present, more alive, more joyful and aware of the holiness of daily life”.
She lives with her extended family in the mountains of northern New Mexico.
Relationship coach and author of Waking Up in The Dark Night of Divorce and Feminine Genius, LiYana works with women at the knife’s edge of heartbreak — reckoning with divorce, breakup, and heartbreak so complex it feels like a dark night of the soul.
LiYana guides women (and their partners) through (not around) the darkest passages of their lives. Through her transformational methodology, LiYana helps individuals, couples, and groups reclaim what they lost in the relationship, break repeating patterns, and emerge awake, aligned, and lit-up.
A former professional dancer and lover of painting with oils, LiYana lives in Asheville, NC with her son, their two cats, and a frankly impressive number of houseplants.
Relationship coach and author of Waking Up in The Dark Night of Divorce and Feminine Genius, LiYana works with women at the knife’s edge of heartbreak — reckoning with divorce, breakup, and heartbreak so complex it feels like a dark night of the soul.
For over 24 years, LiYana has guided women (and their partners) through (not around) the darkest passages of their lives. Through her transformational methodology, LiYana helps individuals, couples, and groups reclaim what they lost in the relationship, break repeating patterns, and emerge awake, aligned, and lit-up.
A former professional dancer and lover of painting with oils, LiYana lives in Asheville, NC with her son, their two cats, and a frankly impressive number of houseplants.
Relationship coach and author of Waking Up in The Dark Night of Divorce and Feminine Genius, LiYana works with women at the knife’s edge of heartbreak — reckoning with divorce, breakup, and heartbreak so complex it feels like a dark night of the soul.
For over 24 years, LiYana had guided women (and their partners) through (not around) the darkest passages of their lives. Through her transformational methodology, LiYana helps individuals, couples, and groups reclaim what they lost in the relationship, break repeating patterns, and emerge awake, aligned, and lit-up.
A former professional dancer and lover of painting with oils, LiYana lives in Asheville, NC with her son, their two cats, and a frankly impressive number of houseplants.
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