Build Your Self Up “Ideas that changed my life”By Rosine UWAMAHORO

This book was inspired by the author’s delights at being in love and her pain when her ‘prince’ stampeded through her heart with spiked shoes as he ran away and into the arms of another woman.

At its best, being in love gives us a glimpse of paradise or as framed in one wise saying: “Love looks through spectacles that make copper look like gold, poverty like riches, and tears like pearls.” Most people, especially the youth, will go through the thrills promised by this ideal state of love, this utopia, until the other’s imperfections and betrayals awaken them from their stupor induced by emotional intoxication. When this happens, coo- per is no longer gold and tears are no longer pearls. The tears become the fire burning trenches on your cheeks and along the walls of your heart. Depression is common and this books aptly frames the author’s sense of despair.

The book is, however, more than a mirror of her cheers and tears. It is also about the lessons learned from her traumatic experience. It does not only frame how one transitions from heartbreak to heartfelt gratitude, but allows the author, young in time, but hardened by trial, to share her new understanding of the meaning of emotions, happiness and truth as well as the power of meditation in self-healing.

Through her journey, she affirms the truth framed in the timeless Afri- can proverb which posits thus: ‘Tough times don’t last, but tough people do.” For her, what started as an impulse, an act of love towards a man, turned into a rich tutorial on the meaning of life, including unravelling the rich wisdom contained in the famous concept of the Law of attraction and power of patience in peace building for the broken heart or fractured communities.

Whether you are a young person searching for love or wrecked by its transience, whether you are an adult troubled by betrayal and feeling de- pressed, this book provides a roadmap to being a better version of your- self, a pathway to self-healing, to a life of peace, patiently sought, as aptly captured in one African proverb set as the book’s last sentence: “At the bottom of patience, once finds heaven.”