- Tupac Shakur
What happens when you feel that you have no choice but to end a long-term, loving relationship because your soul can no longer expand within the limitations of the life you have been living? When the whisper of your soul grows louder than your fear, you are called to leap into the unknown.
Hugging Trees in the Dark: Finding the Courage to Free the Heart is an emotionally charged memoir chronicling my decision to end a thirty‑year marriage and sell a successful business of twenty years — all in answer to my soul’s calling.
It was an awakening that shook me to the core of my being in ways I could not yet understand, and proved to be beyond anything I could have imagined. I often felt struck by a force so powerful that all I could do was surrender to the abyss.
It is my deepest wish that within these pages you find a thread of truth — one that helps you discover the courage to follow your heart... setting you on a path of owning more of your true self.
With love,
Robin Jillian


Author shares her journey with great bravery, demonstrating a fine instinct for degrees of detail shared. An injured soul can, at the time, delve into too much detail about injury, creating a negative tone that makes readers step back in order to distance themselves from the author’s pain…but the author here has avoided this common pitfall.
“She shares moving detail in her dark nights of the soul, sanding down the edges of her pain so that reader may still be able to connect with her message. I found her steps into source to be realistic and relatable, and the paths she takes toward greater faith to be encouraging. Her journal entries of ‘where are you?’ perfectly captures the hollow feeling of being abandoned, which makes the heart ache for her. She demonstrates the evidence of her marital decline with regular, everyday things (time spent on a computer as a way to disconnect, etc.) giving us a view into the tone of her world. We get very good settings and sensory detail as a way to engage the reader, and we get some gorgeous phrasing, such as ‘…the quiet death unfolded…’ Author unspools her next life steps with a natural pace, always delivering us to the space that her faith occupies in her life, and we’re more engaged with her furthering journey as a result. Nice blending.
“Chapter 36 stands out as a nice path to the end of her story, listing her intentions and coming from a place of growth that reader can hear and feel. Very well done. A nice, clean edit lets us stay engaged in this narrative, and author writes with refreshing, bright energy as she demonstrates her evolution as she encourages the same growth in the reader. Nice job.”
© 2026 Robin Jillian. All Rights Reserved