When Things Fall Apart - Book Summary & Review

When Things Fall Apart

Heart Advice for Difficult Times

Pema Chödrön

Pema Chödrön reveals the vast potential for happiness, wisdom and courage even in the most painful circumstances. Pema Chödrön teaches that there is a fundamental opportunity for happiness right within our reach, yet we usually miss it – ironically, while we are caught up in attempt to escape pain and suffering.

The amazing book ‘When Things Fall Apart’ is an accessible guide to compassionate living which shows us

          ·       how we can use painful emotions to cultivate wisdom, compassion and courage,

              ·       ways of communication that lead to openness and true intimacy with others,

          ·       practices for reversing our negative habitual patterns,

         ·       methods for working with chaotic situations and          

             ·       ways to cultivate compassionate, energetic social action

Notable Ideas of the Book

Learn how to make lemonade when life gives you lemons. When life knocks us down, it can get really hard to get back up. Some don’t ever get up.  But we all can develop an approach to life which will allow us to accept and overcome any obstacles that may confront us.

Embracing your fears is your ticket to greater self-knowledge.

No one enjoys being scared, but sometimes we should welcome fear too. When we try to know about our fears instead of avoiding them, they help us gain new perspectives on our personality, relationships and past.

 
When things fall apart in our lives, we normally focus all our energy on resolving the situation instead of trying to learn about the situation itself.
We need to do is to realize that our lives are constantly in flux; things fall into place, fall apart and come together again in unexpected ways. To appreciate this process and learn from it, we have to allow things to just happen. The shifting nature of life often offers solutions to our problems and helps us overcome life’s hurdles.

Loneliness is the perfect opportunity for self-observation and self-love. We take great pains to avoid loneliness, but, solitude provides us with opportunities to relax, recuperate and recentre.

We live a busy life, constantly trying to achieve bigger and better things. But we fail to recognize that there’s an alternative to this high-speed, high-stress lifestyle of ours. This alternative is called the middle way, an open state of mind that allows us to simply observe our problems. To find this way we need to accept that solitude isn’t negative.

The middle way serves as a great opportunity for self-observation. It is a great time for meditation too, as it’s the time to let go of ideals, beliefs and norms to observe yourself as who you really are.

Hope has a surprisingly detrimental impact on our lives.

We think hope helps us to cope with difficulties, but the reality is that hope can make us fearful and anxious about the future and can lead us to disappointment.

In Tibetan, the word for hope is rewa, and fear is dopka. The word re-dok refers to the combination of hope and fear. In re-dok, we’re caught between hoping that we’ll achieve greater things, and the fear of how our failure to do so might reflect on us.

When we question our hopes and fears, we set ourselves free from constant dissatisfaction and disappointment. Questioning our hopes and fears in shows us how unnecessary they really are. Everyone has a unique set of hopes and corresponding fears, but there’s one universal fear everyone experiences: the fear of our own mortality.

The fear of death keeps us from embracing it as a natural part of life. Not only do we fear death, we dislike any end, be it end to a day or a relationship. We need to start accepting endings as part of the constantly changing flow of life, so we can accept that nothing is permanent – not even our existence.

Celebrating impermanence, suffering and egolessness brings us closer to the meaning of life.

Why do we exist? While there’s no definite answer, we will explore three truths - impermanence, suffering and egolessness - of existence to deepen our understanding of life.

First, impermanence is the essence of life. It’s frightening but it’s in our best interests to celebrate impermanence, and recognizing it during times of new beginnings is the best way to do it.

Suffering is another inevitable part of our lives. To embrace suffering as a necessary truth of existence, we need to observe how we react to painful situations, and learn to not condemn those reactions.

Finally, by embracing egolessness, we can learn to feel at ease with our past and future, and thus learn to live in the moment. We often misinterpret lack of ego as lack of confidence but it’s actually a sign of deeper happiness.                                  

Being compassionate toward others allows us to love ourselves more deeply.

Compassion doesn’t just involve connecting with those less fortunate than us, but also with everyone around us and ourselves. It makes us more accepting towards ourselves. This will help us connect with bodhicitta, the suffering of all beings. Practicing bodhichitta involves training our minds for the sake of other living things.

Meditation, breathing and a new perspective on the world can carry us through difficult times.

To stay on track, there are three ancient strategies you can use.

The first is called, no more struggle. This is the practice of using meditation to re-center ourselves when we feel powerless.

The second strategy is using times of suffering as a wake-up call. The three sufferings are passion (or addiction), ignorance and aggression. Don’t suppress or deny them as they arise instead, embrace them.

The final strategy is the manifestation of awakened energy, or the practice of recognizing that everything is perfect the way it is. Instead of looking for something better, learn to work with what you’ve already got.

Pema Chödrön is an eminent spiritual teacher. Her heartfelt advice and wisdom (developed in her 20 years of practice as a Tibetan Buddhist nun as well as her years previously as a normal ‘housewife and mother’) give her a wide appeal. This advice strikes just the right note, offering us comfort and challenging us to live deeply and contribute to creating a more loving world.

Ruchika Verma

Reviews

“Perhaps what makes Pema’s message resonate so strongly with people, no matter what their religion or spiritual path, is its universality. Each of us has experienced heartache; how we interact with that feeling, Pema says, can create the possibility of a more joyful life.”

O, The Oprah Magazine

 
“As one of Pema Chödrön’s grateful students, I have been learning the most pressing and necessary lesson of all: how to keep opening wider my own heart.”

—Alice Walker

You can purchase this wonderful book from Amazon