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

by Gabriel Cohen

When confronted with a cocky student who acted like he already knew it all, he invited the young man to join him for tea. When the student sat down, the master set a cup in front of him and filled it up. He didn’t stop, though: he kept pouring until the tea flowed down the sides of the cup—and he kept pouring. The student watched in surprise until the tea splashed onto the floor. “Master,” he cried. “What are you doing? You can’t pour tea into a full cup!” “Precisely,” the master replied, and showed him out.

I imagine it must be like that when a loved one dies: they leave a silence we yearn to fill.

“There are many things we can’t change about the world, but we can change the way our mind perceives and reacts to them. Our sadness and happiness and anger don’t have some independent reality outside of us—they come only from within.” He smiled. “This is great news. It means that we have the potential to master our emotions, rather than letting them rule us.”

Matthew continued. “How could we deal with this situation differently? How about this? What if we were working really hard on developing patience? When that person sat down next to us, we could say, Great! I’m trying to develop patience, and here comes a perfect opportunity to practice. All of a sudden, the ‘problem’ isn’t a problem anymore.

One of my beefs in our marriage was that my wife continually took on new freelance responsibilities, often unpaid ones—and then she would complain about how much work she had to do, as if all of those chores had somehow been imposed on her by the universe. She seemed unable to see that her hectic, harried lifestyle was something she had created for herself. I was irritated by her view that all her problems were coming from outside, but now I had to wonder if I wasn’t doing the same thing. Wasn’t I saying, She’s making me angry, as if I had no choice in the matter?

Zen Buddhists refer to our normal uncontrolled thought process as monkey mind, and it’s easy to see why: we swing wildly from branch to branch, grasping at appealing objects, skittering away from unpleasant ones. We don’t feel we have much choice about where the monkey leaps next.

For example, some therapists encourage punching a pillow to work through anger. Considering new studies in neuro-science, that doesn’t seem like a very good idea. Researchers have found that such behavior actually increases aggression; expressing anger in this way helps to build and strengthen the neural pathways for that unpleasant emotion—the last thing we want to do.

Once, when he traveled to a strange monastery with his attendants, a snarling guard dog broke free and rushed at them. The attendants screamed and fled, but Trungpa ran right toward the dog, which was so astonished that it turned tail and ran. Trungpa offered the same remarkable advice about suffering. While we try so hard to run away from it or deny it, he advised “leaning into the sharp points.” Stay with the pain. Feel it fully. The result, Chödrön said, could be the opposite of what we expect.

We panic when we’re not in control, but we can learn to accept our lack of power over everything. We can let our fear go. Instead of searching desperately for firmer ground, we may discover that uncertainty and not-knowing are okay. “To stay with that shakiness,” writes Chödrön, “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.”

” Even in those early days, I could see that my anger at Claire was causing me to see only her bad side; I was blocking out the four years of happiness we had shared, and all of the kind and loving things she had done. 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.

If someone hits us with a stick, Buddhists say, we should not waste time getting angry at the stick. Likewise, if someone wrongs us, we should not waste time being angry with the person—they’re only being propelled by their delusions.

These stories seemed to be all about feelings. Marriage-and-divorce, the ultimate emotional crayon box. What a rainbow: infatuation, lust, yearning, love, kindness, compassion, bliss, dissatisfaction, jealousy, resentment, bitterness, anger, mourning, grief. . . . In the middle of a divorce, we may be reminded of the old saying, There’s a thin line between love and hate. We stand together on one bright side of a line, and then somehow cross over into someplace dark. If

popular fallacy about Buddhism: that it sees desire as the root of all suffering.

In fact, 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.

As one of my Buddhist teachers pointed out the other day, we humans actually spend the bulk of our time on this planet, day in and day out, chasing after happiness, or at least comfort and satisfaction. We think something outside us will provide it, and we desire that thing.

not really in me as a person; it seemed more about avoiding the pain of her last breakup. If she could get excited about getting together with someone new, she wouldn’t have to spend time abiding with the guilt and disappointment of that failed relationship. And she had been with someone continually since she was in her early twenties; she was anxious about whether she could handle life on her own.

The first is desirous attachment, the delusion that causes us to see external things as inherent sources of happiness, to exaggerate their good qualities, and makes us want to grasp for and merge with them.

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.”

“When I talk to two friends who have broken up,” she said, “I often find that they have developed what I call an enemy mind. They loved each other, and now—all of a sudden—they’re saying, ‘That person was such a bitch!’ For them to feel okay, the other person has to be the bad guy. “I think that enemy mind comes out of a belief that the other person is trying to infiltrate and hurt you. We feel so vulnerable, but we don’t know why—we’re seeing everything in the wrong way. It’s a huge mistake, but we think we’re so at the mercy of external things. We think that everything around us dictates how we feel, and that everything that comes close is a threat. We attach our fear to something that shouldn’t cause it—the person that’s closest to us. They become the enemy because they’re the person who might hurt us. There’s a protect-myself-from-them state, a holding back.

It’s not your partner who is going to hurt you, because suffering and happiness are internal experiences.

I think back to moments in my marriage. When our living situation was stable, Claire and I got along very well. But when I knew that we had to move, my attachment to my old place was so deep that I felt vulnerable and at risk. When Claire didn’t like a new apartment I suggested, or I didn’t like one that she preferred, I took those disagreements as personal threats. When that financial matter arose, my sense of self felt deeply wounded.

Buddhists use another analogy to describe self-cherishing. Imagine that you’re alone in a rowboat in the middle of a lake. You’re lying on your back, looking up at the sky, and you can’t see over the sides of the boat; you’re just drifting contentedly. Suddenly, another boat comes along and smacks into yours. You immediately become angry at the other boatman or woman. (Or maybe you become depressed by their bad treatment of you. Either way, the essential thought is, How dare they do this to me?) You jump up, and look into the other boat—and discover that it’s empty. Notice what happens to your sense of wounded self: it shrinks. You’re able to calm down, relax, and lighten up. Here’s the interesting thing: even when we think that someone else is in the other boat—in divorce, for example—we can still learn to let go of our anger, to see that their intention is not necessarily to cause us suffering or harm.

“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.”

What doesn’t kill us can make us kinder.

If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him. This isn’t some kind of weird incitement to violence; it means that if you believe that the teachings are something out there (like happiness), then you’re on the wrong path. Like many other initially puzzling Zen statements, it’s meant to shock us out of smugness, blind observance, and attachment to an ossified set of beliefs. It reminds us that Buddhism should be a deeply personal, internal quest.

If we don’t know how to be content in our mind, we can’t even be content with our food. Eating at the best restaurants in the world won’t make any difference. There is someone in a village in India eating curry out of a clay bowl, more content than we are. When we find the pair of shoes we want, for a brief moment we feel content. But when that moment passes, we’re on the move again: food doesn’t taste good, clothes don’t fit, the sheets are too rough, the bath’s not hot enough. We need better movies, more exciting books, a new relationship. We need to live on a different planet. Desire is a creature with an endless appetite. Like a spark put to dry grass, it just consumes. By its very nature, it can never be satisfied, because it is rooted in the aggression of looking outside ourselves for relief. That expectation always results in disappointment, self-generated pain. It’s the mind giving itself a hard time.

If a problem can be solved, then there is no need to worry about it. If a problem cannot be solved, then there is no use to worry about it.

) In divorce, we’re also liable to spend a lot of time brooding on the past. A famous Zen story addresses that tendency. A young monk and his master came upon a young woman hoping to cross a river. Despite the monastic prohibition against touching women, the older monk promptly lifted the woman onto his back and carried her across. As the two monks continued on their journey, the younger one fretted about this violation for hours. Finally, he told his master of his agitation. The older monk’s reply was swift and firm: “I set that woman down at the other side of the river. Why are you still carrying her around?”

In divorce, we’re also liable to spend a lot of time brooding on the past. A famous Zen story addresses that tendency. A young monk and his master came upon a young woman hoping to cross a river. Despite the monastic prohibition against touching women, the older monk promptly lifted the woman onto his back and carried her across. As the two monks continued on their journey, the younger one fretted about this violation for hours. Finally, he told his master of his agitation. The older monk’s reply was swift and firm: “I set that woman down at the other side of the river. Why are you still carrying her around?”

a wonderful insight on divorce.

Even in my dire state, I was somehow aware that the emotion flooding my mind wasn’t the same as my mind. It was just a cloud passing through. Such thoughts can swell into tempests, but if you have ever taken an airplane trip, you know that you can rise above a turbulent storm into a clear blue sky. Even in our darkest hours, that clear mind is always there behind the clouds, calm and stable.

“Just as there is room in the sky for a thunderstorm, so there is room in the vast space of our mind for a few unpleasant feelings; and just as a storm has no power to destroy the sky, unpleasant feelings have no power to destroy our mind.”

Thus far in meditation, we’ve been trying to focus on some single point, such as the breath. The goal is to calm the mind and to see that thoughts are just transient. To use another and to see that thoughts are just transient. To use another analogy from nature, we can picture them as waves. In a difficult relationship, especially a divorce, we can feel as if we’re bobbing helplessly, tossed about. We get distracted by the waves and think that they are our mind—until we realize that even the biggest surges are nothing compared to the deep, still ocean below. Meditation can put us back in touch with the stability that’s always available underneath. It takes a lot of practice to get good at it, but even a few minutes of sitting can calm that choppy water.

Last night I was reading Charlotte Joko Beck’s book Everyday Zen, and I was startled by her chapter about hope. We’re taught that hope is a beautiful, essential human quality: it’s the thing that’s supposed to get us through hard times and lift us up, like the part in a movie when the string section swells and our protagonist takes on some grueling but ultimately heartwarming challenge, Rocky Balboa running up the museum steps . . . When you run out of hope, all you’re left with is despair, right? Now listen to Beck: “Actually, it’s not terrible at all. A life without hope is a peaceful, joyous, compassionate life.” Again, that shocking, counterintuitive Buddhist voice. “We are usually living,” she adds, “in vain hope for something or someone that will make my life easier, more pleasant.” As a result, we “lose ninety percent of the experience of our life.” If we’re always looking for happiness somewhere else, some other time, we’re never going to be in it.

I’m beginning to understand that my drawing of a hard-edged line between imaginary thought and “real” action might be a mistake. As Geshe Kelsang Gyatso points out, all human creations had their origin in our imaginations. Cathedrals and computers didn’t just magically appear; someone had to think of them, and draw up plans. And then, of course, they had to follow through on an intention to build them.

I’m reminded of a legendary Buddhist practitioner named Geshe Ben Gungyal, who gauged his progress in a unique way. During the course of the day, when a negative thought arose he would place a black pebble in front of him. When a positive thought arose, he would place a white pebble. At the end of each day, he counted the pebbles. If there were more black ones, he would resolve to try harder. If there were more white ones, he would allow himself a little praise. It took him years to get to a point where he could pass one whole day without any black pebbles.

“Oh my God, I never gave freely. This was a huge realization. I didn’t communicate. I wasn’t always honest with my feelings. I often didn’t speak, and thought, If I act, he’ll pick up on what I’m thinking; I would expect him to know. You can’t expect people to pick up on those things. And I gave, but expected something back. I didn’t realize that then.”

We should be very grateful for the people in our lives who seem the most difficult. They’re blessings in disguise. Without them, how would we ever make spiritual progress?

When I was a kid, I studied Greek mythology. I’m not sure why, but one story made a very deep impression on me. Orpheus, a wandering musician, falls in love with a beautiful maiden named Eurydice. They marry and are able to love each other for a time, but then she’s carried off by Hades, the king of the Underworld. Orpheus is so grief-stricken, so in love, that he dares what no man has ever dared: he travels down to the Underworld to bring her back. Hades is so impressed by Orpheus’s courage and his singing that he consents to let Eurydice travel back with him to the upper realm. There’s one condition, though: on the journey up, Orpheus must never look at her. They make their way up toward the light, but at the last moment, he turns to her and she slips away forever. Despite my Buddhist training, my slowly increasing mindfulness and peace, I still empathize with Orpheus’s suffering. Every few months I still have those dreams in which I go back and find Claire, and we’re reunited, and once again I experience a deep, selfless side of our love. Then I wake up and she is gone.