When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chodron

 

Credit: When Things Fall Apart

Overview

Pema Chödrön's perennially best-selling classic on overcoming life's difficulties cuts to the heart of spirituality and personal growth--now in a newly designed 20th-anniversary edition with a new afterword by Pema--makes for a perfect gift and addition to one's spiritual library. How can we live our lives when everything seems to fall apart—when we are continually overcome by fear, anxiety, and pain? The answer, Pema Chödrön suggests, might be just the opposite of what you expect. Here, in her most beloved and acclaimed work, Pema shows that moving toward painful situations and becoming intimate with them can open up our hearts in ways we never before imagined. Drawing from traditional Buddhist wisdom, she offers life-changing tools for transforming suffering and negative patterns into habitual ease and boundless joy. Credit: When Things Fall Apart

Meet the Author

Pema Chödrön is an American Buddhist nun in the lineage of Chögyam Trungpa. She is resident teacher at Gampo Abbey in Nova Scotia, the first Tibetan monastery in North America established for Westerners. She is also the author of many books and audiobooks, including the best-selling When Things Fall Apart and Don't Bite the Hook. Credit: Shambala Publications.

The Fog Always Lifts

Credit: Sasha Laghonh

Excerpt from "Fog" penned by Sasha Laghonh

Life can be challenging as we drive through the fog in the rain, we struggle for visibility when mother nature clouds our view. Similarly, the everyday emotions and biases we breathe in and out thrive as fog which hinder our ability to truly see life for what it is ... at face value. We can't control mother nature although we can control how we approach life matters.

It may take a chance encounter, or a monumental event for our heart's compass to start pointing North. When we resist the flow of life, it will reflect circumstances that become more challenging to resolve because our human egos (or perhaps naivety) lead us to believe the divine compass is absent, or even broken in our lives. The divine compass is not engineered to malfunction.

It's 'divine' after all, right?

The truth is we humans fail to make an effort to learn how the compass works. Perhaps some people know how to work a compass but they choose to side with impatience by taking matters into their own hands without consulting with their higher power. 

Life works in mysterious ways. 

A stranger can come into your path to deliver a message but you discount their presence because your divine compass is absent. You fail to read the situation well because you have lost sight of who you are and therefore everything in your reality becomes a blur. What you thought was real was only a mirage. What you thought was a hoax turns out to be real. It comes down to your beliefs. When you're ready to believe in something greater than yourself, the answers will appear clear before you.

Buckle up. Now turn on your windshield wipers and drive to your destination.