When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times

Front Cover
Shambhala Publications, Jun 7, 2016 - Religion - 176 pages
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.
 

Contents

Intimacy with Fear I
1
When Things Fall Apart
7
This Very Moment Is the Perfect Teacher
13
Relax As It Is
19
Its Never Too Late
25
Not Causing Harm
31
Hopelessness and Death
37
Eight Worldly Dharmas
45
The Love That Will Not Die
87
Going against the Grain
93
Servants of Peace
97
Opinions
107
Secret Oral Instructions
113
Three Methods for Working with Chaos
119
The Trick of Choicelessness
127
Reversing the Wheel of Samsara
137

Six Kinds of Loneliness
51
Curious about Existence
59
Nonaggression and the Four Maras
65
Growing Up
73
Widening the Circle of Compassion
79
The Path Is the Goal
143
Afterword to the 20th Anniversary Edition
147
Bibliography
151
Resources
153
Copyright

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

About the author (2016)

Pema Chödrön is an American Buddhist nun in the lineage of Chögyam Trungpa and resident teacher at Gampo Abbey in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, the first Tibetan Buddhist monastery in North America. She is the author of numerous best-selling books, including The Places That Scare You and Living Beautifully.

Bibliographic information