The Storms Can't Hurt the Sky: The Buddhist Path through Divorce

by Gabriel Cohen

“to stay with a broken heart, a rumbling stomach, with the feeling of hopelessness and wanting to get revenge—that is the path of true awakening. Sticking with that uncertainty, getting the knack of relaxing in the midst of chaos, learning not to panic—this is the spiritual path.”

“When we forgive, we set a prisoner free and discover that the person we set free is us.”

He said that the first step is to “rediscover the humanity of the person who hurt us. [When we are wronged] we shrink him to the size of what he did. If he has done something truly horrible, we say things like, ‘He is no more than an animal.’ Or, ‘He is nothing but a cheat.’ Our ‘no more thans’ and our ‘nothing buts’ knock the humanity out of our enemy. . . . He is only, he is totally, the sinner who did us wrong.” When we forgive, though, “We take him back into our private world as a person who shares our faulty humanity, bruised like us, faulty like us, still thoroughly blamable for what he did to us. Yet, human like us.”

Forgiving didn’t mean that I needed to excuse any wrongs she might have done. It meant that I could take a more compassionate, understanding view of why she did them—I could see that she had acted out of a desire to avoid pain, rather than any wish to hurt me.

As the Tibetan spiritual leader Geshe Kelsang Gyatso puts it in his book Transform Your Life: A Blissful Journey: Living beings have no faults. . . . Although sentient beings’ minds are filled with delusions, sentient beings themselves are not faulty. We say that sea water is salty, but in fact it is the salt in the water that makes it salty, not the water itself. [ . . . ] Similarly, all the faults we see in people are actually the faults of their delusions, not of the people themselves. . . . If someone is angry, we think ‘He is a bad and angry person,’ whereas Buddhas think ‘He is a suffering being afflicted with the inner disease of anger.’ If a friend of ours were suffering from cancer we would not blame him for his physical disease, and, in the same way, if someone is suffering from anger or attachment we should not blame him for the diseases of his mind.

“Everybody wants the same two things. We all want to avoid suffering, and we all want to be happy.”

if you can change your mind, you can change your world.

Suffering—so this argument goes—doesn’t come from things that happen to us. It comes from the mistaken way we think about them.

Buddhism is not against making out, or ice cream, or any of our cherished delights. There’s nothing inherently wrong with these things, as long as we see them clearly for what they are: simply sources of transitory pleasure. The trouble comes not with desire, but with desirous attachment, which causes us to see those things in a distorted way, to exaggerate their perceived good qualities, to get mentally agitated, to try to merge ourselves with them. Next thing we know, we’re ruining someone else’s marriage, or we’re overweight, or addicted to some harmful substance, or in debt. In short, we’re suffering.

Just as our happiness is not inherent in external things, our suffering isn’t inherent in them either. It arises from our mistaken reliance on them.

(In any romantic situation, the difference between desirous attachment and real love may be hard to determine. Here’s a simple litmus test: if you’re feeling a lot of mental agitation, chances are it’s the former. Why? Because, as Matthew explained in one of his talks, any time your mind is agitated, that indicates that there’s a delusion present—you’re setting yourself up in opposition to what’s real, and that hurts.)

“The perfect person we thought we were getting together with turns out to be . . . a person. And we get angry.” The more we fail to see that coming, the more disappointed we’re going to be.

If we’re willing to believe that someone else is the source of our happiness, chances are we’re going to be equally willing to believe that they’re the cause of our suffering.

“You create the experience of love by giving the gift of acceptance and appreciation. You destroy it by being judgmental, critical, and controlling. Notice how you feel when someone is non-accepting towards you. Notice how fast the experience of love disappears. Instantly, you get hurt. You get upset and close down. You put up your walls of protection and automatically become non-accepting and critical in return. Then the other person gets upset, puts up his or her walls of protection, and becomes even more non-accepting towards you.”

“We think that we need to fight for protection,” explained Ferguson. “We believe that if we just fight hard enough, then somehow, everything will get resolved in our favor. Not so. In fact, the opposite is true. The more you fight someone, the more of a threat you become to that person. You force that person to fight you even harder.”

“We’re longing for happiness and connection,” she added, “but we actually rely upon delusions that cause the opposite: suffering and isolation. The delusional minds we go to for refuge, such as that enemy mind we spoke about, and anger, and jealousy, are the very causes for many of the relationship problems we have. We only rely on them because we have this mistaken view that they’ll protect us from getting hurt. But—if we check—we can see that they’re sources of suffering in themselves, and they just create more suffering.”

When someone else fails to go along with the program of “making” us happy, we decide that they’re a problem. We may decide that we don’t like them. We may even choose to believe that there’s something inherently unlikeable about them.

When someone contradicts our desires, when they hold up their own Happiness For Me Now! placard and it blocks ours, we tend to feel threatened, defensive, and angry. Our sense of self actually intensifies.

“All the joy the world contains has come through wishing happiness for others. All the misery the world contains has come through wishing pleasure for oneself.”

“Love is a mind that appreciates another, cherishes them, and wants them to be happy.”

“All the joy the world contains has come through wishing happiness for others.”

When we put the focus on someone else, we release ourselves from the boundless anxiety that accompanies our eternal What about me?

if you love others, you won’t just contribute to their happiness—you’ll increase your own.

. . . as we endeavor to practice with relationships, we begin to see that they are our best way to grow. In them we can see what our mind, our body, our senses, and our thoughts really are. Why are relationships such excellent practice? Why do they help us to go into what we might call the slow death of the ego? Because, aside from our formal sitting [meditation], there is no way that is superior to relationships in helping us to see where we’re stuck and what we’re holding on to. As long as our buttons are pushed, we have a great chance to learn and grow. So a relationship is a great gift, not because it makes us happy—it often doesn’t—but because any intimate relationship, if we view it as practice, is the clearest mirror we can find.

We can seek relationships not because they’re easy, or always satisfying, or guaranteed to make us happy. We can welcome them, in all their messy, imperfect, frustrating glory, because they’re a perfect field for spiritual growth. (That sounds a little groovy, but hey, if it’s true, it’s true.)

we need to start from where we are: we’re human beings afflicted with overbearing desires and aversions and a powerful sense of self. The good news is that we don’t have to transform ourselves overnight—we

To put it in modern terms, we’re like computers that come from the factory with excellent hard drives. The problem is that—all too often—we’re operating on faulty software, which tells us, Grab outside yourself for happiness! Think that it’s all about you! Get angry or sad whenever you feel hurt! If we could get rid of these corrupted instructions, we’d be fine—no, we’d be happy.

As Shantideva puts it, “Because we are all equal in wanting to experience happiness and avoid suffering, I should cherish all beings as I do myself.”

The Buddha said that our root delusion is ignorance. It has two components. The first is self-cherishing, our wrong tendency to see ourselves as the most important thing in the universe. Now we’ve come to the second part. It’s called self-grasping. This doesn’t just refer to grasping at our sense of self—it means that we wrongly believe in the inherent nature of everything. We grasp at the notion that things exist in the way that they appear to us.

In truth, Buddhists believe, nothing in the universe has an essential, fixed nature or reality. Not raccoons, not sharks, not friends or enemies. Nothing. Not even inanimate objects.

We tell ourselves stories, and they take on such weight and power that they can determine our reality. I recall an axiom from a college sociology class: If we perceive something as real, it can have real consequences. Here’s the example the professor used: if we believe that goblins are lurking along a certain path in the woods, we might take a different path. The goblins are imaginary, but our idea that they’re there affects our real actions.

We see the world not as it is, but as we are.

Desire is a creature with an endless appetite.

Japanese Buddhist master Shunryu Suzuki was once asked to summarize the essence of Zen. I love the way he encapsulated it in one short phrase: not necessarily so. Stay open. Don’t approach the world with a set of expectations and beliefs and preconceptions. See every moment fresh. He called this essential approach to life “beginner’s mind.”

“We think people are loveable or unloveable depending on how they behave. No—they’re loveable because we love them.”

The radical message of Buddhism is that the world is not something out there that we can only react to. It exists for us in our own minds, and we have the power to change our minds.

“You can make friends with everyone in your mind, from your side. You can become a friend of the world.”

Anger is a particularly demanding emotion.

When I feel myself falling back into that abstract, determined mind of achievement, of future goals, I try to lift my head and look around. I notice the way a distant bunch of seagulls are scattered across the lake like a handful of white teeth. I see the first green shoots of crocuses spraying up out of the spring mud, not to be denied. I hear the fantastically young, cheery voices of the Beatles blending in my headphones. Sometimes I even remember to smile.

Zen masters look at the spiritual journey in a very different way: they say that the path—with all its stumbles and wrong turns and screw-ups—is enlightenment.

unbelievable carnage has been wreaked on the planet by people who were absolutely, rigidly convinced of their own righteousness.

real love is never the cause of suffering.

“The most significant thing Buddhist teachings have taught me is that another person is not responsible for my state of mind, so I’m not externalizing another person as my source of happiness. I don’t always feel I have to be right, and I’m more accepting of others, and of situations, and of myself.

“Life is so difficult, how can we be anything but kind?”