To Love and Let Go: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Gratitude Audiobook (Free)

“Rachel beautifully illustrates that adoring fiercely and grieving deeply tend to be two halves of the same whole. Her tale will break you down and lift you up.” —Glennon Doyle, author of the #1 NY Occasions bestseller Like Warrior and creator of Together Rising

While on her way to instruct a yoga exercises retreat in March 2014, Rachel Brathen collapses in an airport, taken to her knees by excruciating abdomen pains. She actually is rushed to the hospital on the tiny island of Bonaire, and hours later forced to going to Love and Let Go: A Memoir of Like, Loss, and Gratitude undergo medical procedures. When she wakes up from anesthesia, her partner is weeping at her bedside. While Rachel was struck down with apparently mysterious discomfort, her best friend, Andrea, sustained fatal injuries due to a vehicle accident. Rachel and Andrea got a magical a friendly relationship. Though they appeared nothing as well—one girl high, blond, and Swedish, the additional short, brunette, and Colombian—everyone known as them gemelas: twins.

Over the 3 years following Andrea’s death, at what might appear from the exterior to be the happiest time—with her engagement to the person she loves and a blossoming career that takes her all around the world—Rachel faces a series of trials which have the potential to define her life. Unresolved grief and stress from her youth make the pounds of her sadness unbearable. At each turn, she is confronted again and again using a choice: Will she shed everything, succumb to grief, and grasp for control that’s beyond her reach? Or can she move through losing and release?

When Rachel and her hubby conceive a child, pregnancy becomes a period to heal and a chance to end up being reborn herself. As she recounts this transformative period, Rachel stocks her hard-won intelligence about existence and death, like and fear, what this means to be a mom and a little girl, and how to become someone who walks through the fire of adversity using the never-ending practice of adoring hard and allowing go.