Summary: When Things Fall Apart

The GIST

When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chödrön carries the subtitle Heart Advice for Difficult Times, and that is exactly what it delivers: counsel for the moments when a marriage ends, a job disappears, someone dies, or the future you were building simply stops being available. Chödrön, an American teacher in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition and a student of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, does not offer a way out of those moments. Her advice runs against nearly every instinct we have. Instead of escaping pain, she says, turn toward it with friendliness and curiosity. Instead of scrambling for solid ground, relax into the fact that there never was any.

Publishers Weekly called the book the Tibetan Buddhist equivalent of Harold Kushner's When Bad Things Happen to Good People, and it has become one that therapists hand to clients and friends press on friends. Readers who are not Buddhist, including committed Christians, report that it speaks to them as directly as to anyone. Its promise is modest and enormous at once. It will not make the hard thing go away. It suggests that happiness has been within reach the whole time and that we keep missing it because we are so busy trying to get away from what hurts. One line states the outlook in miniature: "Everything that ends is also the beginning of something else. Pain is not a punishment; pleasure is not a reward."

The Big Ideas

Fear is where the path begins

Chödrön starts with fear, because fear is what we feel when we get close to the truth of our situation. The ordinary reaction is to bolt. She describes how predictable we are about it: when we dislike what is happening, we lash out at someone else or turn on ourselves, anything to regain a sense of security. Her teacher had a phrase for the alternative, "leaning into the sharp points." Rather than treating fear as a signal to retreat, she treats it as a sign that we are near something worth knowing, about our past, our relationships, or who we are.

This takes nerve, and she is honest that the nerve is often forced on us. There are times when we are cornered, when everything has collapsed and every exit is closed, and there is nowhere left to hide. That, she says, is where courage comes in. Staying put at exactly that point, with the broken heart and the churning stomach and the wish for revenge, is not a detour from the spiritual path. It is the path. In one of the book's most quoted sentences: "Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found within us."

Groundlessness: there was never anything to stand on

The second idea is the one readers seem to carry away longest. We behave as though life rests on firm ground and occasionally gives way. Chödrön reverses that. We are always groundless. We never had control. A crisis does not remove our footing so much as expose that the footing was imagined, which is why it frightens us so badly and why we go hunting for the comfort of feeling in charge again.

One reader who came to the book after a bitter divorce described spending months searching for a strategy that would let her breathe, and realizing through these pages that every strategy was another grab at control. Simply accepting groundlessness, she found, released a great deal of tension: the exhausting chase after security and the dread of what would happen if she stopped. Chödrön's publisher sums up the teaching as relaxing into the essential groundlessness of our whole situation, and finding in the middle of the chaos a truth and a love that cannot be destroyed.

She illustrates the point with an old story. A struggling family depends on its one working son. He falls and breaks his leg, and it looks like ruin. Then the army sweeps through, conscripting every able-bodied young man, and the injured boy is left at home. We never know what an event means while we are inside it. As she puts it, "When there's a big disappointment, we don't know if that's the end of the story. It may be just the beginning of a great adventure."

Hope and fear are one coin

Early in the book Chödrön makes a claim that many readers find hard to accept: hope is not the opposite of fear but its twin. Tibetan has a single word, re-dok, that joins the two. To hope for a better life is at the same moment to be afraid of not getting it, and both pull us out of the present into an imagined future. We are, she suggests, addicted to hope, and the addiction keeps us permanently dissatisfied.

This ties to a central Buddhist term. The belief that we can secure lasting pleasure and steer clear of pain is what Buddhism calls samsara, in her words "a hopeless cycle that goes round and round endlessly and causes us to suffer greatly." We chase the next day off, the next holiday, the next thrill, as evidence that we are happy, and flee whatever disturbs us, and the chasing and fleeing are themselves the suffering. Her remedy is to question both the hopes and the fears. Why does this outcome matter so much? What exactly am I afraid will happen? Looked at steadily, many of them lose their grip. Even the fear of death, the most universal one, can be contemplated instead of avoided, and doing so tends to clarify what is important.

Three facts of life: impermanence, suffering, egolessness

Chödrön asks us to examine, and even to celebrate, three truths that we normally resist. The first is impermanence. Everything is changing and ending all the time, and fear of that fact lies at the root of much misery. Accepted, it lends a new value to every beginning, because each one will end. The second is suffering. It cannot be removed from a human life, and trying to dodge it produces more of it. As one reader records her teaching, "suffering is inevitable for humans as long as they believe that things last." The practice is to observe our feelings when in pain without judging them. The third is egolessness: loosening the constant preoccupation with ourselves, the self that always wants more in order to feel complete and never does.

None of this is a counsel of gloom. Life, on this view, is not a puzzle to be finished or a destination to arrive at. It comes together and falls apart and comes together again, and healing comes from allowing room for all of it: grief and relief, misery and joy.

Unconditional friendship with yourself

The foundation for everything else is loving-kindness directed inward. Chödrön does not mean self-improvement or positive thinking. She means seeing ourselves as we actually are and staying friends anyway. She can be blunt about it: instead of letting negativity take over, we can admit that right now we feel terrible and not be squeamish about taking a good look. Sitting meditation is the training ground. We learn to stay still with restlessness and pain instead of reacting, and gradually there is less running.

Her image for the result is a mountain. Hail, wind, snow and scorching sun pass over it, animals and people come and go and leave their mess, and the mountain remains. When we have seen ourselves completely, she writes, "there's a stillness of body that is like a mountain." The well-being we envy in certain people usually comes from this: having been willing to be awake to all of life, dark stretches included.

From your own pain to everyone's

The last movement of the book turns outward. Chödrön observes that we habitually put up a barrier called blame, an ancient and well-practiced device for feeling better. Blaming protects what is soft and tender in us; it also blocks real contact with other people. And opinions held with aggression, however just the cause, add aggression to the world. "The way to stop the war is to stop hating the enemy."

The practice she teaches for this is tonglen, a breathing meditation that uses poison as fuel. On the in-breath we take in suffering, ours and the world's, instead of pushing it off. On the out-breath we send peace and relief. It reverses the usual reflex of grabbing the pleasant and rejecting the painful, and it turns private hurt into fellow feeling for everyone who hurts the same way.

Putting It to Work

• Pause at the sharp point. When anxiety or anger surges into an urge to act, do nothing for a moment. Be the mountain and let the weather pass.
• Sit with it. Give restlessness and pain your attention without judgment. Whatever you feel is allowed to be there.
• Drop the story of control. Notice each attempt to nail things down, and try relaxing instead of tightening.
• Question your hopes along with your fears. Ask why a result matters so much and what you are bracing against.
• Befriend yourself as you are, on the bad days especially.
• Catch blame as it rises and feel the tenderness it is guarding.
• Practice tonglen: breathe in the difficulty, breathe out relief, for yourself and for others.
• Ask her daily question when things get edgy: "Am I going to practice peace, or am I going to war?"

Who Should Read It

This is for anyone in the middle of a loss, a breakup, an illness, burnout or plain upheaval, and for those who love someone in that place. It also suits newcomers to meditation who want its purpose explained in plain, unsentimental language. Readers looking for a plan to fix their problems will not find one. Readers ready to stop fighting their own lives may find, as many have, a book to return to again and again.