13/05/2025
So very poignant and bitter sweet and yet so much compassionate wisdom..
In the winter of my undoing, when grief had hollowed me to a husk and anxiety circled like hungry wolves at the edge of my consciousness, I found Pema Chödrön's "When Things Fall Apart" pressed into my hands by a friend who knew. Not what to say—because what words suffice when your life has shattered?—but what might serve as a lantern in that darkness.
I read it first in fragments, unable to absorb more than whispers of wisdom through the static of my pain. Dog-eared pages. Tear-stained margins. Words underlined so fiercely the pen nearly tore through paper. I carried it like a talisman, this small book with its impossible invitation—to move toward suffering rather than away, to discover within collapse the seeds of an awakening I couldn't yet imagine.
What follows isn't simply what I learned from Chödrön's teachings, but how they slowly, imperceptibly became the soil from which something new could grow in the devastated landscape of my heart. How a Buddhist nun I've never met somehow knew exactly what my shattered spirit needed to hear in its darkest hour. How wisdom, offered with both unflinching honesty and boundless compassion, can become the most tender of medicines for what we believe might kill us.
1. The Wisdom of No Escape
The first teaching that undid me was perhaps the simplest: stop running. For decades, I had perfected the art of escape—through achievement, through busyness, through carefully constructed identities, through relationships that served as distractions. Chödrön gently but firmly pulled away these veils, showing me how my desperate attempts to avoid discomfort were actually the source of my deepest suffering.
"We think that by protecting ourselves from suffering, we are being kind to ourselves," she writes. "The truth is we only become more fearful, more hardened and more alienated."
In the raw aftermath of loss, these words felt both impossible and inevitable. What if, instead of frantically seeking the exit door from pain, I could simply sit with it? What if my vulnerability, rather than my armor, held the key to healing?
2. Staying with the Broken Heart
"Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found in us." This passage, underlined three times in my copy, became my meditation through sleepless nights when waves of grief threatened to drown me.
Through her words, I began to understand that heartbreak itself could be a sacred teacher if I could stay present to its teachings rather than frantically trying to stitch myself back together.
I learned to ask different questions: not "How can I feel better?" but "What is this teaching me about impermanence, about love, about the human condition we all share?" In the tenderest moments of surrender, I glimpsed what she meant by "the soft spot"—that vulnerable core that pain exposes and that, paradoxically, connects us to all beings who suffer.
3. The Sacred Pause
Perhaps no teaching transformed my daily experience more profoundly than Chödrön's guidance around pausing. In moments when emotion threatens to overwhelm, when habitual reactions rise like storm clouds, the simple act of pausing creates space for something new to emerge.
"This very moment is the perfect teacher," she reminds us. The pause became my practice—the breath between stimulus and response where freedom lives.
I began to notice how automatically I moved away from discomfort, how quickly I reached for distraction. The pause allowed me to witness these movements with compassion rather than judgment. Sometimes just three conscious breaths were enough to interrupt patterns that had controlled me for decades.
4. The Path Is the Goal
"We think that the point is to pass the test or overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don't really get solved. They come together and they fall apart." This teaching, perhaps more than any other, revolutionized my understanding of what healing actually means.
I had been living as though happiness were a destination I could reach if I just solved enough problems, accumulated enough wisdom, or purified myself of enough flaws. Chödrön's teaching revealed the exhaustion inherent in this approach and offered instead a radical acceptance of life's fundamental uncertainty.
The path itself—with all its stumbles, wrong turns, and moments of clarity—is the point. There is no graduation day from being human, no final resolution to life's essential vulnerability. This understanding brought not despair but a profound relief. I could stop striving for some imagined state of perfection and instead embrace the messy, beautiful process of awakening that unfolds breath by breath.
In surrendering the fantasy of arrival, I found myself more present to the journey—to the texture of this moment, with all its imperfection and wonder.
BOOK: https://amzn.to/3S0NCjU
You can ENJOY the AUDIOBOOK when you register for Audible Membership using the link above.
