When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times

Cool loneliness is the author’s term for the loneliness one encounters during meditation that transforms into a sense of kindness toward oneself and others. Instead of trying to get rid of “hot” loneliness by keeping busy with lots of social activity, one intentionally gets in touch with and accepts the essence of the feeling. Thus, one discovers a cool quality of aloneness that contains six virtues: “less desire, contentment, avoiding unnecessary activity, complete discipline, not wandering in the world of desire, and not seeking security from one’s discursive thoughts” (72). Cool loneliness serves as an example of an emotion that people tend to resist that, when accepted during meditation, can morph into a feeling they accept and honor.

A dharma is a way of doing things. The Buddhist way, commonly referred to simply as “the dharma,” is the teachings of the Buddha. These include the Four Noble Truths: Life is suffering; suffering is caused by craving; craving can be transcended through awakening; and awakening can be attained through the Noble Eightfold Path. The dharma further includes the Noble Eightfold Path itself: right viewpoint, right motivation, right speech, right conduct, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right meditation. The dharma also contains the sutras, or sermons, of the Buddha, along with associated commentaries.

Following the dharma is part of Buddhist practice, especially for nuns and monks. The Theravada version places more stress on the Noble Eightfold Path, whereas the Mahayana tradition (including Tibetan Buddhism) focuses more on enlightenment itself.

The dharma isn’t a “babysitter” that guards the hopeful from pain. It’s a set of guideposts, but “dharma was never meant to be a belief that we blindly follow” (53). Everyone’s journey is different; trying to make the dharma a shield prevents it from being useful.

The author also discusses the “eight worldly dharmas” (61), four pairs of opposites that control people’s lives: pleasure and pain, praise and blame, fame and disgrace, and gain and loss. Becoming involved in these pairs brings suffering; practicing the Buddha dharma helps people to see the futility of the worldly dharmas. 

Gampo Abbey is a Buddhist monastery in Canada established in the early 1980s by Trungpa Rinpoche. The abbey, part of the Shambhala Buddhist tradition, stands on a narrow plane between sea cliffs and forests on the coast of Nova Scotia. Gampo Abbey offers retreats of a week to three years. Chödrön, the abbey’s first director, describes it as “a vast place where the sea and the sky melt into each other. The horizon extends infinitely, and in this vast space float seagulls and ravens” (11). The abbey is where the author has spent much of her career as a Buddhist nun, dharma teacher, lecturer, and writer.

Maitri is an important concept in the author’s Shambhala method of Buddhist practice. “The word for loving-kindness in Sanskrit is maitri. Maitri is also translated as unconditional friendliness” (30). Maitri is the essential attitude of Shambhala meditation: The meditator accepts all thoughts and feelings in a friendly manner and without judgment, which opens their minds to the natural wisdom within; thus released from the burdens of anxiety, their hearts are free to open up to compassion for others. Buddhists often use specific meditation techniques to evoke a sense of loving-kindness, which then manifests more often during day-to-day life.

It’s said that the Buddha faced four maras, or demons, just before he became enlightened. Each mara is a way in which people resist reality:

The first mara is called devaputra mara. It has to do with seeking pleasure. The second one, called skandha mara, has to do with how we always try to re-create ourselves, try to get some ground back, try to be who we think we are. The third mara is called klesha mara. It has to do with how we use our emotions to keep ourselves dumb or asleep. The fourth one, yama mara, has to do with the fear of death (89-90).

The pleasure-seeking devaputra mara keeps people busy so they don’t have to face their anxieties. Skandha mara is the attempt to build up a powerful ego that can withstand threats and uncertainties. Klesha mara is the strongly emotional reaction to painful events by which people push away painful happenings; yama mara obsesses people with the fear of their own annihilation. Transcending these distractions, a follower of the Buddha dharma discovers a sense of spacious openness, a natural intelligence that heralds the awakening of consciousness to the vastness of reality.

In Buddhism, meditation is a process that involves a person sitting, usually on a floor, and observing their own consciousness as it ebbs and flows. In some practices, the meditator focuses on an object—breathing, a candle flame, or perhaps a mental puzzle, as in Rinzai Zen Buddhism. In the Shambhala technique that the author teaches, the mind focuses partially on the out-breath: “about 25 percent of the attention should be on the breath, so that one was still aware of one’s surroundings” (28)—but the goal always is to be generally aware of one’s total mental state.

The main purpose of this kind of meditation is to learn to accept one’s thoughts and feelings, whatever they may be. Through this process, people learn to cease fighting themselves; they thereby become more serenely responsive to the world and less anxious about the various problems they face.

The goal of Buddhist meditation is to attain “enlightenment,” a profound insight about one’s deep connections to the universe. This realization brings about a great serenity, along with a sense of love and compassion for one’s fellow humans and for all living things. Often, too, there arises from enlightenment a profound desire to help others.

The problem with meditating as a means to achieve enlightenment is that such a goal pushes away the very thing to be achieved. Chödrön is well aware of this irony: She stresses that meditation not be goal-oriented, and that the process of self-acceptance is the enlightenment. This is because, when one accepts all their feelings, no matter how unpleasant, one thereby abandons their defenses, which make up the structures of one’s ego. Psychologically defenseless, one is effectively egoless and thus able to encounter the world directly, without a screen of thoughts and schemes. 

Samsara, or “wandering,” is the continual rebirth and death of souls into the worldly realms such as the universe. In Buddhism, the goal is to achieve awakening, or enlightenment, which enables souls to enter nirvana and end the cycle of rebirth. Samsara also refers to people’s endless desires: “Thinking that we can find some lasting pleasure and avoid pain is what in Buddhism is called samsara, a hopeless cycle that goes round and round endlessly and causes us to suffer greatly” (15). Ironically, then, the search for nirvana keeps people stuck in samsara. Noticing this circular struggle releases the searcher from constant questing after the supposed pleasures of enlightenment—and that is the enlightenment itself.