About
Rosanne Annoni
Welcome to my website and thank you for visiting it. I’m excited to announce the publication of my memoir, Unfolding the Heart: One Woman’s Quest for True Nature, which will be published September 29, 2026. Writers are often asked how long it took to write their book, hours spent at the computer or with a notebook, edits and revisions. The truth is it took my whole life.
I grew up in Allentown, PA where I attended Catholic schools for twelve years. As much as I loved my friends in grade school and high school, I couldn’t wait to get away from what seemed like a provincial town and controlling parents. Attending a small Catholic college in Cleveland, Ohio didn’t scratch the itch.
When I was twenty-three years old, I was able to escape to Rutgers Graduate School of Social Work. It was there that I discovered Leonard Cohen, marijuana, birth control, and Transactional Analysis. Maybe Allentown wasn’t provincial, but I sure was when I first set foot on the campus at Rutgers. True to my desire to break free from my staid white upbringing, I married a fellow student who was Black and we had a son, but divorced after five years of marriage.
In 1979, I remarried and moved to San Francisco where I was certain I had discovered nirvana. The city was alive with creativity, beauty, diversity and adventure. I explored metaphysics and explored various practices of spirituality. I was tapping into a deep vein within, the seeker, and these practices touched me in a way that I hadn’t felt since I was a young Catholic child.
I divorced again after three years, once again a single working parent. Although that was challenging, I lived an active life, which often included running races, bicycling, skiing, and hiking with my son and my friends. In 1985, my son moved back to New Jersey to live with his father. I filled in the space and time with work—taking on more private clients in my psychotherapy practice, backpacking, pursuing meditation and other spiritual practices.
1989 was a pivotal year for me. I met the man who would become my life partner and discovered the Diamond Approach–a spiritual path of self-realization that combines traditional Buddhist and Zen practices with modern psychology to help deconstruct the ego. After practicing psychotherapy for thirty-five years, I closed my practice and in 2000, became an ordained teacher of the Diamond Approach with over 5000 students worldwide. I taught in the UK, Europe and the US which allowed me to follow my passions of teaching both large groups, private students, and traveling to new cities and learning about different cultures.
My dearest friend, of forty-five years, Mike, who I met during our Transactional Analysis training in New York City, moved to Boston in 1982 and eventually bought a second home on Cape Cod with his husband, Moe. My husband, Rich, and I visited Mike and Moe often, each time falling more in love with the land, the sea, and peacefulness of the Cape.
Mike and I had a dream of one day living on the same street. The dream came true when a magical confluence of events allowed me and Rich to purchase a home four doors up the street from him and Moe in 2009. After we sold our home in California in 2015, we moved full-time to Cape Cod.
Mike and I began writing together and were each other’s faithful first reader. He published a memoir in 2016, and in 2019, I stepped back from teaching fulltime to focus on completing my memoir. When Mike died the following year, I was unable to write, swimming in the deep waters of grief and loss. I spent hours watching birds on my deck with Zoey and with my husband’s encouragement, resumed playing piano. Birds and piano saved my life.
These days I mentor teachers in the Diamond Approach, which I love, meditate, read, walk Zoey, write, play piano, and hang out with my husband and friends. It’s a good life, not without the challenges that come with aging and circumstances beyond my control, but a life I am grateful to be living.
It is this rich material of my life—the failures and successes, the searching for answers which sometimes rose up and at other times I had to dig deep for, the role of mother, teacher, wife and friend, the spiritual yearnings—that Unfolding the Heart grew from.
With sincere wishes that your heart, too, is on its own journey of unfolding.
Rosanne
Rosanne Annoni
Rosanne Annoni is a writer, teacher, and mentor. Her debut memoir, Unfolding the Heart, releases on September 29, 2026.
I grew up in Allentown, PA and attended Catholic schools for 16 years. I couldn’t wait to get away from what seemed like a provincial town and my controlling parents, even though I did feel loved by them and realized later in life that they were doing their best.
My first escape was to graduate school in NJ when I was twenty-three. It was during grad school that I discovered my passion for psychotherapy, studied many techniques and became a certified Transactional Analyst. I married, had a son, and divorced after five years of marriage. When I moved to San Francisco in 1979 to start a second marriage, I thought I had discovered nirvana. The city was alive with creativity, beauty, diversity and adventure. I discovered spirituality, which felt deeper and more personal than my religious upbringing.
After my second divorce, three years later, I was once again a single parent, something I was less successful at than working with clients and students. I lived an active life, often including my son, running races, bicycling, skiing, hiking. I had a successful psychotherapy practice, discovered the Diamond Approach—a spiritual path that combines traditional Buddhist and Zen practices with modern psychology to help deconstruct the ego. Eventually I was ordained as a spiritual teacher of the path, taught in the UK, Europe and the US. I loved traveling, loved teaching large groups as well as private students. When my son moved back to NJ to live with his father, it freed me to pursue my passions: teaching, backpacking, reading and eventually writing. I was a psychotherapist for thirty-five years and in 2000, was ordained as a teacher of the Diamond Approach with its over 5000 students worldwide.
My dearest friend, of forty-five years, Mike, who I met during our Transactional Analysis training in New York City, moved to Boston and eventually Cape Cod. We did therapy weekends with our clients both on Cape Cod and in Marin County, CA until I stopped practicing as a therapist. When I met the man who I eventually married, we visited Mike and his husband often on Cape Cod.
Mike and I had a dream of one day living down the street from each other. The dream came true when a magical confluence of events allowed us to purchase a home four doors up the street from him and Moe in 2009. After we sold our home in California, we moved full-time to Cape Cod in 2015. Mike and I began writing together and being each other’s first reader. When he died five years ago, I stopped writing for a few years, dealing with grief and loss. I discovered birding, and bought a piano, both of which saved my life. My current passions are reading, birding, walking the dog, piano playing, knitting, hanging out with my husband and friends, and writing.
In 2024, I was awarded an Emerging Writers Fellowship to Aspen Words. And by the end of that year, I had a finished manuscript that was accepted by She Writes Press for publication in September 2026.
Photo by Kim Rodriques