Opening the Gates of the Heart: A Journey of Healing

This is a book about triumph over grief, utter despair, and hopelessness. It is about emotional and spiritual healing. The book speaks equally to the struggling soul who is embarking upon, or in the middle of, a journey of self-awareness, discovery, growth and healing, and to the one who has been on the journey and is celebrating the change in their life. To the reader, the author says, “Getting the book’s message into the world is my passion, so it is my hope that you will come away from the experience of reading the book with feelings of hope, inspiration, and empowerment.”
Using photographs of wrought-iron gates coupled with inspirational verses and titles, award-winning author and photographer Carolyn CJ Jones shows the path she took through a process of change, from great despair and praying to die, to wholeness and loving life.
Opening the Gates of the Heart has a most unique beginning, one which the author believes was divinely-guided. In her own words, she tells the unusual and charming story of the gates.
“It was one day in February of 2001 and I was preparing to leave the San Francisco Bay Area and go on a road trip to ‘find myself.’ I was preparing to stop in San Diego for a couple of weeks to ‘get a handle’ on my long-standing drinking problem.
“Before I left, I went to the sailboat upon which I had lived until 6 months earlier when I had left my 20-year marriage. I was going to say good-bye to my former husband. As I sat in the cockpit and looked around me at the hills, I noticed a neighborhood that I had never visited. I decided to go over there and when I did, I discovered these lovely wrought-iron gates, sitting on the hillside below huge mansions... quietly unused. I was entranced! Having been a photographer from the age of ten, I vowed to photograph them if ever I returned.
“I did return to the gates in February, 2004, at which time I spent hours and hours walking, shooting roll-after-roll of slide film. At first, I photographed them for their beauty. At some point, however, they began to represent my heart, closed from life’s hurts and pains. I began to wonder if other’s hearts were also closed from pain and if that’s why we sometimes do not treat others or ourselves with much loving-kindness.
“In November of that year, I wrote in my journal words that described and gave voice to a gate image I had just titled. I wrote, ‘I have spent a lifetime spinning webs of terror and shame that stand as sentinels to my heart.’ I was flabbergasted! This prompted a search of all my journals, as I looked for anything I'd written about my feelings and emotions, ways to treat myself and others better, and principles of living. I ended up finding verses that fit with roughly three-quarters of the 42 photos that now appear in the book.
"When this happened, the idea came to me to compile into a book the verses and the images I'd titled. I began to match them up. I arranged and re-arranged the images and their corresponding verses repeatedly. I was in 7th heaven, engaging in my passion.
“I continued to work on the book in the years between its conception and its publication in 2010, with the exception of three years. During that time, I became Carolyn Jones Photographs, and sold framed images of my gates. In 2010, I became Gate Lady Publishing, had the book edited, designed, and printed. It was launched October 8, 2010 at a small celebration.
“Opening the Gates of the Heart is my story and, thus, I am the expert on the topic of my evolvement from feelings of shame, worthlessness, and sorrow, to ones of joy and inner peace. This book is about healing, and my story, although a valuable lesson for us all, is not the subject of importance. There are, after-all, many roads to healing and that is the important thing that matters. It is my hope that the gates will help us all, no matter what our circumstances are that guide us to the journey... again and again.”