July 28, 2026

The Healing In Falling Apart

Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don't really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It's just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.

Pema Chödrön is an American-born Tibetan Buddhist nun who has spent decades teaching Western students how to work with pain instead of running from it, and this passage comes from her best-known book on turning toward difficulty. She wrote it after her own hard years, including a painful divorce, which pushed her toward the monastic path and toward this teaching on groundlessness. The passage says life does not move toward some final fix; things come together and fall apart, over and over, and the task is not to solve this but to make room for whatever it brings. In the Buddhist tradition, impermanence is one of the three marks of existence: everything conditioned arises and passes, and grasping at any of it as fixed is the root of suffering. Practice here means training the mind, on the cushion and off it, to meet each rise and fall with curiosity rather than resistance.

A principle of Eastern Wisdom: Impermanence →