When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times. An insightful guide to self-improvement through compassion and wisdom

by Pema Chödrön

It’s not the same as being told not to enjoy anything pleasurable or to control ourselves at any cost. Instead, this journey of discipline provides the encouragement that allows us to let go. It’s a sort of undoing process that supports us in going against the grain of our painful habitual patterns.

So on the inner level, the discipline is to return to gentleness, to honesty, to letting go. At the inner level, the discipline is to find the balance between not too tight and not too loose—between not too laid-back and not too rigid.

By patience, we do not mean enduring—grin and bear it. In any situation, instead of reacting suddenly, we could chew it, smell it, look at it, and open ourselves to seeing what’s there. The opposite of patience is aggression—the desire to jump and move, to push against our lives, to try to fill up space. The journey of patience involves relaxing, opening to what’s happening, experiencing a sense of wonder.

when we feel we must have resolution, when someone yells at us and we feel insulted, we want to yell back or get even. We want to put out our poison. Instead, we can connect with basic human restlessness, basic human aggression, by practicing tonglen for all beings. Then we can send out a sense of space, which further slows things down. Sitting there, standing there, we can allow the space for the usual habitual thing not to happen.

Exertion is not like pushing ourselves. It’s not a project to complete or a race we have to win. It’s like waking up on a cold, snowy day in a mountain cabin ready to go for a walk but knowing that first you have to get out of bed and make a fire. You’d rather stay in that cozy bed, but you jump out and make the fire because the brightness of the day in front of you is bigger than staying in bed.

The more we connect with a bigger perspective, the more we connect with energetic joy.

Every time we give, every time we practice discipline, patience, or exertion, it’s like putting down a heavy burden.

When we sit down to meditate, we can connect with something unconditional—a state of mind, a basic environment that does not grasp or reject anything.

When we cling to thoughts and memories, we are clinging to what cannot be grasped.

This is our birthright—the wisdom with which we were born, the vast unfolding display of primordial richness, primordial openness, primordial wisdom itself. All that is necessary then is to rest undistractedly in the immediate present, in this very instant in time.

We train in returning to the unchanging heart of this very moment. All compassion and all inspiration come from that.

So we simply let that nostalgia be and know that all human beings are going to feel like that. There’s a place for nostalgia, just as there’s a place for everything on this path. Year after year, we just keep taking off our armor and stepping further into groundlessness.

This is an extremely helpful practice, because we have a lot of opinions, and we tend to take them as truth. But actually they aren’t truth. They are just our opinions.

All ego really is, is our opinions, which we take to be solid, real, and the absolute truth about how things are.

If we don’t get swept away by our outrage, then we will see the cause of suffering more clearly. That is how the cessation of suffering evolves.

Notice your opinions. If you find yourself becoming aggressive about your opinions, notice that. If you find yourself being nonaggressive, notice that. Cultivating a mind that does not grasp at right and wrong, you will find a fresh state of being. The ultimate cessation of suffering comes from that.

You may have noticed, however, that there is frequently an irritating, if not depressing, discrepancy between our ideas and good intentions and how we act when we are confronted with the nitty-gritty details of real life situations.

There is a perplexing tension between our aspirations and the reality of feeling tired, hungry, stressed-out, afraid, bored, angry, or whatever we experience in any given moment of our life.

We liked meditation and the teachings when we felt inspired and in touch with ourselves and on the right path. But what about when it begins to feel like a burden, like we made the wrong choice and it’s not living up to our expectations at all?

We could be there, feeling off guard, not knowing what to do, just hanging out there with the raw and tender energy of the moment. This is the place where we begin to learn the meaning behind the concepts and the words.

We’re so used to running from discomfort, and we’re so predictable. If we don’t like it, we strike out at someone or beat up on ourselves.

The next time there’s no ground to stand on, don’t consider it an obstacle. Consider it a remarkable stroke of luck. We have no ground to stand on, and at the same time it could soften us and inspire us. Finally, after all these years, we could truly grow up.

It’s quite daring, and maybe we feel we aren’t up to it. But that’s the point. Right there in that inadequate, restless feeling is our wisdom mind. We can simply experiment. There’s absolutely nothing to lose. We could experiment with not getting tossed around by right and wrong and with learning to relax with groundlessness.

We practice to liberate ourselves from a burden—the burden of a narrow perspective caused by craving, aggression, ignorance, and fear.

Through practice, we realize that we don’t have to obscure the joy and openness that is present in every moment of our existence.

The innermost essence of mind is without bias. Things arise and things dissolve forever and ever. That’s just the way it is. This is the primary method for working with painful situations—global pain, domestic pain, any pain at all. We can stop struggling with what occurs and see its true face without calling it the enemy.

“Approach what you find repulsive, help the ones you think you cannot help, and go to places that scare you.”

The three poisons are passion (this includes craving or addiction), aggression, and ignorance (which includes denial or the tendency to shut down and close out). We would usually think of these poisons as something bad, something to be avoided. But that isn’t the attitude here; instead, they become seeds of compassion and openness.

In terms of everyday experience, these methods encourage us not to feel embarrassed about ourselves. There is nothing to be embarrassed about. It’s like ethnic cooking. We could be proud to display our Jewish matzo balls, our Indian curry, our African American chitlins, our middle American hamburger and fries. There’s a lot of juicy stuff we could be proud of. Chaos is part of our home ground.

When we wake up in the morning, we can dedicate our day to learning how to do this. We can cultivate a sense of humor and practice giving ourselves a break. Every time we sit down to meditate, we can think of it as training to lighten up, to have a sense of humor, to relax. As one student said, “Lower your standards and relax as it is.”

The key is changing our habits and, in particular, the habits of our mind.

Maybe the most important teaching is to lighten up and relax. It’s such a huge help in working with our crazy mixed up minds to remember that what we’re doing is unlocking a softness that is in us and letting it spread. We’re letting it blur the sharp corners of self-criticism and complaint.

We are stuck in patterns of grasping and fixating which cause the same thoughts and reactions to occur again and again and again. In this way we project our world.

It’s like riding in a train sitting backwards. We can’t see where we’re headed, only where we’ve been. This is a very encouraging teaching, because it says that the source of wisdom is whatever is going to happen to us today. The source of wisdom is whatever is happening to us right at this very instant.

Now is the only time. How we relate to it creates the future. In other words, if we’re going to be more cheerful in the future, it’s because of our aspiration and exertion to be cheerful in the present. What we do accumulates; the future is the result of what we do right now.

Through our own good spirit, we can be willing to relate directly with what’s happening, with precision and gentleness. That’s what creates fundamental cheerfulness, fundamental relaxation.

What seems undesirable in our lives doesn’t have to trigger habitual reactions. We can let it show us where we’re at and let it remind us that the teachings encourage precision and gentleness, with loving-kindness toward every moment.