When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times

In Chödrön’s view, the first step on the path is to realize that there’s no hope of arriving at a permanently wonderful place. No matter how one twists and turns to make happiness solid and everlasting, life pulls that possibility away. People find that they “can’t get any ground under [their] feet” (53).

This leads to “nontheism,” or the abandonment of the hope that a god will protect one from sorrow. Nontheism does not purport that there isn’t a god, but that such a being won’t prevent suffering. People must, therefore, come to terms with anxieties without a safety net; otherwise, they “abdicate [their] responsibilities” (53) and cling to anything, even the Buddhist Dharma.

Chödrön notes that suffering is a part of life; it’s not a mistake. People, though, turn their hope for less pain into an obsessive pursuit. Feeling inadequate, people yearn for better, but hope and fear go hand in hand. Abandoning hope, though, makes room for people to feel “some kind of confidence in our basic sanity” (55).

One can then renounce their dependence on alcohol, sex, and the like, not because they’re wrong, but because people use them as “babysitters.” Instead, one practices hopelessness, the feeling that there’s nothing they can do about themself and therefore no reason not to encounter life in all its shifting fullness.

The fundamental thing people fear is death. It seems remote, and people push it away, but it’s always there. Death comes daily in little ways: disappointments, a job that fails, a relationship that collapses. People avoid this pain by freezing stoically, or escalating emotionally, or distracting themselves. Chödrön suggests that it’s better to be simple, to go to the “bare bones” of the thing and discover the joy of life and death together.

The eight worldly dharmas consist of four pairs of opposites: pleasure and pain, praise and blame, fame and disgrace, and gain and loss. These feel significant, but people make them up—being old might seem negative to one person but positive to another, for example—and thus none are “concrete.” People react to them in accordance with their beliefs about what’s good and bad in the world.

In meditation, one can learn how this works. Someone says something and one feels insulted, as if slapped in the face, but the entire pain is imagined. Even happy thoughts dazzle people, and they get “swept away” by them.

A story is connected to the person who brought Buddhism to Tibet, Padmasambhava, also called Guru Rinpoche. As a child, he delighted everyone, and the king brought him to live in the palace. One day, little Padmasambhava was playing on the roof with two of the king’s ritual instruments. Curious about them, he dropped them from the roof to see what would happen. They landed on two passersby and killed them. The public was outraged and demanded the child be exiled. Padmasambhava thus learned about the dichotomy of fame and disgrace, and this cured him of the eight worldly dharmas.

This understanding leads to “nonattachment,” which does not mean cool disinterest, but curiosity and compassion. Seeing how one gets hooked, they realize that this is true for other people as well; “we spontaneously feel more tenderness for the human race” (67). This motivates people to begin to want to help others as well as themselves.

Letting go of the need for resolution—to solve one’s problems once and for all—allows people to discover an openness to paradox and uncertainty. Doing this, though, can feel abrupt and overwhelming. This requires courage.

Chödrön acknowledges that it is challenging to avoid the urge to move one way or another to avoid discomfort. This is true, for example, of loneliness. If one can sit with that feeling, they encounter a “cool loneliness” that has six components.

The first component is “less desire.” When one permits feelings of loneliness, even for only a minute or so, this reduces the urge to make that feeling go away. They’re no longer “seduced by [their] Very Important Story Lines” (73), like having to be a winner or believing they’re trapped in victimhood.

The second component is “contentment,” or the ability to have nothing and thus nothing to lose. With time, jumpiness subsides and one can sit with the feeling without having to fix it. The third quality is “avoiding unnecessary activities” (74). Rather than searching for companions to deaden the feeling, one becomes willing to not have a fix for loneliness.

“Complete discipline” is the fourth component. This means a gentle willingness to return to the present when one starts to panic about being lonely. Busying oneself with others prevents them from seeing things as they are: “We are cheating ourselves when we run away from the ambiguity of loneliness” (75).

The fifth component is “Not wandering in the world of desire” (75). People stop searching everywhere for comforting ways to keep the pain of loneliness at bay. They no longer behave like children looking for their mother. The sixth component is “not seeking security from one’s discursive thoughts” (76). One no longer seeks the company of internal chatter about their beliefs and theories.

Cool Loneliness isn’t itself a solution to one’s problems; it’s an awareness that there aren’t any solutions. When loneliness appears, one can take it as an opportunity to open oneself to the spaciousness of their heart.

Existence has three truths or marks: “impermanence, suffering, and egolessness” (79). Chödrön acknowledges that these sound negative, but counters that they are in fact fundamental and joyful.

Impermanence is the nature of things. Seasons come and go, people meet and part, light and dark trade places, young become old. People prefer permanent things, but when they cease to struggle against change, they harmonize with life’s sacred connectedness.

Suffering sounds awful, yet pleasure always goes with pain; each generates and tempers the other. Inspiration connects one to the sacred, but alone it leads to arrogance; wretchedness weakens people, but it humbles and softens their hearts. Both sides thus can be appreciated (81).

Egolessness isn’t a loss but a gain. When people are not self-absorbed, their natural goodness radiates outward. To be egoless is to accept the world as it is with “unconditional joy.”

When one recognizes impermanence as ever-present, they cease fighting it. A sense of mindful curiosity arises, and one notices the lack of intelligence in their habitual reactions. They can do this as well with their suffering. As this process continues, one experiences moments of egolessness, when they encounter life without defenses.

Openness and curiosity often lead to a feeling of peace, which some consider the fourth truth of life. When one lives unprotected by assumptions and instead encounters the world with openness and curiosity, they may find a sense of peace and realize that their “fundamental situation is joyful” (86).

Just before he became awakened, the Buddha was attacked by four demons, or Maras. Each mara wielded weapons, but the swords and arrows turned into flowers. The maras were obstacles in the path of enlightenment that, properly considered, became allies.

Two types of obstacles, outer and inner, can bedevil a person. Outer obstacles are other people or situations that appear to harm a person. Inner obstacles consist of one’s objection to the way life is; one believes it should be different, and therefore fights against it. A problem persists until one accepts it, whereupon they “learn whatever it has to teach” them (88).

Each of the four maras is a way of avoiding one’s experience. The first is called devaputra mara, the seeking after pleasure. People do this to distract from or dampen negative feelings; Chödrön offers addiction and busyness as common examples. Noticing this process can open people to compassion for themselves and others.

The second obstacle is skandha mara, when one suffers a great loss that shatters their illusions of control. As quickly as possible, a person reconstructs their self-belief to feel safe again. This mara, though, is an opportunity: If one doesn’t rebuild their ego sense but instead explores their reactions with curiosity and openness, they have a chance to avoid resurrecting the burden of ego and instead retain the fundamental attitude of “not knowing.”

The third mara is klesha mara, the tendency to turn a setback into a significant crisis. People prefer strong feelings to uncertainty, so they ruminate, exaggerate the problem, and dramatize it, using their emotions to try to force things back into the old framework, which felt more solid. Seeing the truth of this, one no longer takes big emotions so seriously; one also can develop an empathy for other people’s tendency to dramatize their feelings.

The fourth mara, yama mara, appears when a person finally begins to take action, perhaps through meditation, and starts to think that, with a bit more effort, their life will be perfect. This static concept, though, is itself a form of death—the very thing that, at bottom, everyone fears: “We are killing the moment by controlling our experience” (94). Inevitably, something will happen that demolishes one’s confident assumptions.

Life isn’t about certainty; instead, one can respond to challenges with an open heart. By accepting problems rather than finding ways to avoid them, people turn the swords of the demons into flowers.