Anxiety, stress, and depression are on the rise-impacting all ages, genders, cultures, and countries. This trend is fueled by our inability to befriend our grief, and our lack of knowledge around how to dance with grief. But this book can help tremendously! Tears Are the Source of Your Passion encapsulates the collective wisdom of Chris Saade and Mandy McMullen Bird, M.A., LCMHC, and their powerful 60+ years of combined experience counseling and coaching hundreds of clients through the grieving process and their dances with depression back to a deeper authenticity, creative passion, health, and wellness. Upending the traditional perspective of grief, Saade and Bird espouse that grief is ultimately a paradoxical treasure of life-we can mine it to be a gift of heart and soul. They demonstrate how your wounds can actually become wombs holding important keys to your authenticity and life-calling. The specific and concrete steps laid out within these pages are designed to give you hope and to offer tools to relate to grief and anxiety as they surface throughout your life-journey.

This ingenuitive model celebrates grief as an integral part of our humanity. Through the model, hope and dignity bring some much-needed openings to a universally difficult part of our human journey. By tackling the profound intricacies of authenticity, passion, paradox, global connection, solidarity, and the heart, Saade and Bird lay out a path of self-exploration, self-birthing, and peace.

This brilliant, down-to-earth book is precisely what the world needs right now. Rich with tools and wisdoms, it will support you in your efforts to both heal and to empower your steps forward. Grief repressed, is grief that destroys. Grief honored, is grief that liberates. This book will help you to transform your grief into the gold at its roots. Jeff Brown, Author of Grounded Spirituality and An Uncommon Bond

This is an essential read. As someone who has lived the words in this book, I so deeply and wholeheartedly vouch for the wisdom, truth, and necessity of all the gems shared here. The insights and understandings found in this book are essential for the healthy, whole, and vibrant lives we all so yearn to live. Chelan Harkin, Author of Susceptible to Light

What is being offered within these pages is precisely what Rumi knew to be possible… a guide to reach the gold through your grief… a path forward when you are suffering, aching with pain that seems as though it is devouring you… Seldom, in all my years of pursuing and championing sacred activism, do I encounter teams as dynamic, dedicated, and willing to dive deep into excavating the heartbreak of the world as the team of Saade and Bird! Andrew Harvey, Internationally acclaimed poet, novelist, translator, mystical scholar, and spiritual teacher

I’ve learned so very much about the power of grief through both Chris and Mandy. As hopelessness is at unprecedented levels, especially from the impact of the pandemic and racial unrest around the world, now more than ever we must learn to harness our grief to fuel our passion for positive change. When we dive deep into our despair, feel it deeply, and learn from it, we can turn our greatest pains into our most significant work. Chris and Mandy give us a roadmap for how to turn our tears into our greatest triumphs. They have certainly done so for me, and it led to my global advocacy for teaching the ‘how to’ of hope. Kathryn Goetzke, Creator of Hopeful Minds and Hopeful Cities, Author of The Biggest Little Book About Hope, Host of The Hope Matrix Podcast, and Chief Mood Officer at The Mood Factory