When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times

So great - will need to reread this for sure. Perfect antidote to the 2024 election results. 

Wise Buddhist teachings. Will revisit this one

"We awaken this bodhichitta, this tenderness for life, when we can no longer shield ourselves from the vulnerability of our condition, from the basic fragility of existence. In the words of the sixteenth Gyalwa Karmapa, "You take it all in. You let the pain of the world touch your heart and you turn it into compassion."

"The poet Jalaluddin Rumi writes of night travelers who search the darkness instead of running from it, a companionship of people willing to know their own fear. Whether it's in the small fears of a job interview or the unnameable terrors imposed by war, prejudice, and hatred; whether it's in the loneliness of a widow or the horrors of children shamed or abused by a parent, in the tenderness of the pain itself, night travelers discover the light of bodhichitta."

"The path is uncharted. It comes into existence moment by moment and at the same time drops away behind us. It's like riding in a train sitting backwards. We can't see where we're headed, only where we've been."

"In what do we take refuge? Do we take refuge in small, self-satisfied actions, speech, and mind? Or do we take refuge in warriorship, in taking a leap, in going beyond our usual safety zones?"

"Do everything as if it were the only thing in the world that mattered, while all the time knowing that it doesn't matter at all"

I thought this would be a book on getting through difficult times, but really, this is a crash course in mindfulness and meditation. It was exactly the inspiration I needed to get back into a meditation practice, examine mindless habits I partake in to avoid discomfort, and try to practice self-compassion and outer-compassion at every turn. Plus a bunch of other gems. I underlined these pages like mad.

This is more a collection of essays than a cohesive whole. Pena Chodron says that the book came about as a collection of unrelated dharma talks she has given. Still, the central theme of all of them is facing pain rather than hiding from it. Using meditation, finding one's boddhicatta and converting pain to loving-kindness, one can face pain and convert it to compassion. Some chapters are stronger than others, and if you have time to read only one, make it chapter 10. I'd give this 3 and 1/2 stars if I could. It's not a strong enough book to warrant 4 stars.

Oh, Pema. The trick to what she writes about is that it is so easy to understand intellectually, and so incredibly challenging to know emotionally, much less to actually pull off in the mess of day-to-day living. But that's the point, really: to keep trying. To let things be messy (and there's good messy and bad messy) and be in the messiness and know that the messiness isn't what we're supposed to escape from to our real lives, the messiness IS our real lives. Which we're constantly trying to run from. So, as usual, she's given me lots to think about in a few precious pages, and I know it's a book I'll be going back to.

One of my favorite passages:
“People have no respect for impermanence. We take no delight in it; in fact, we despair of it. We regard it as pain. We try to resist it by making things that will last–forever, we say–things that we don't have to wash, things that we don't have to iron. Somehow, in the process of trying to deny that things are always changing, we lose our sense of the sacredness of life. We tend to forget that we are part of the natural scheme of things.”

(Re-read this book - I think for the 3rd time? - five years after this first review. It just gets better, and this is the quote that I'm loving the best these days: “To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest.”)