My Favorite Book for Learning How to Better Manage Anxiety
When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times by Pema Chödrön
Have you ever read a book that just stays with you long after you’ve turned the last page? I definitely have. Some of the most memorable books I have read are the ones that taught me how to better manage my anxiety. I definitely have a lot of favorites… but the one that had the biggest impact is, “When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times” by Pema Chödrön. Pema is an American Buddhist Teacher, author and nun who is best known for her down-to-earth interpretation of Buddhist meditations and how they can be applied to everyday life. In this book, she offers life-changing tools that help us transform suffering and negative patterns into ease and joy. Here is my interpretation of how this incredible book relates to anxiety in order to help you better navigate your own anxiety with clarity and confidence.
Note: All quotes mentioned below are directly from “When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times.”
Facing Your Fears
“Fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to the truth.”
The root cause of anxiety is fear. Fear of loss, fear of losing control, fear of missing out, fear of being wrong, fear of not being loved, fear of shame, etc. According to Pema, fear is a universal experience - something even the tiniest insect feels. We will all encounter it, especially when we are faced with the unknown. Which, when you think about it, is exactly how anxiety takes over - we perseverate over the fear of what-ifs or the fear of what could have beens. Pema suggests that you have to get to know fear, look it right in the eye and become familiar with it. Not to solve your problems, but to undo your old ways and patterns of thinking and seeing.
When faced with fear, it’s your natural instinct to disassociate, freak out and spin off. Instead of sitting with it in the present moment, you do everything you can to check out. But when everything falls apart, and you run out of options to escape, there’s nowhere to hide.
“Sooner or later we understand that although we can’t make fear look pretty it will nevertheless introduce us to all the teachings we’ve ever heard or read.”
Her very first point in this book is to consider yourself lucky when you encounter fear. It takes courage to stick with what comes up and to let yourself be “nailed to the present moment”, because it’s in the present moment that you wake up to what is and not get caught up in your thoughts. The best way to practice being present is through meditation. It’s here that you can practice being with “what is”. Eventually, you start to take this practice off your cushion and into your daily life. This is where you learn to be with your experiences and lean into life, even the difficult stuff, so you stop protecting yourself from it and start to see it more clearly.
“This very moment is the perfect teacher, and it’s always with us.”
Loving-Kindness
According to Pema, in order to be intimate with the present moment, you have to develop “maitri’ - loving-kindness and an unconditional friendship with yourself.
“What makes maitri such a different approach is that we are not trying to solve a problem. We are not striving to make pain go away or become a better person. In fact, we are giving up control all together and letting concepts and ideas fall apart.”
When you are feeling anxious, my guess is that the judgy voice inside your head is full of chatter, making you believe all the negative stories it tells you about yourself. Recognizing that these are just thoughts and remembering that you are the thinker behind the thoughts is the first step. The second step is to not beat yourself up for having those thoughts.
Personally, I struggle with maitri. For some reason I think I should be able to better control my negative self-talk and have more say in the way my life unfolds. If I could just solve this problem or that issue, my life would be perfect. If I could just get to that next “thing”, I would finally be happy. It’s my expectation that things will finally come together and I’ll be able to live a fulfilled life! Can you relate?
But, the reality is that things constantly fall apart and come together. There will always be missing pieces.
“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.”
“Things are always in transition if we could only realize it. Nothing ever sums itself up in the way that we like to dream about.”
The key is to be able to appreciate, look closely, and open your minds to all that life has to offer by cutting out all expectations and learning how to be with what is, as it is. This is the core of maitri, or loving-kindness for yourself.
Our experience to What Is
One of the classic Buddhist Teachings on hope and fear concerns are known as the eight worldly Dharmas. These are four pairs of opposites - things you want more of in your life or things you want to avoid.
The pairings are:
Pleasure - Pain
Praise - Blame
Fame - Disgrace
Gain - Loss
When you’re feeling good, your thoughts are usually around things you like and when you’re feeling bad, your thoughts are usually around things you don’t like.
As humans, we constantly search for pleasurable experiences and try to avoid unpleasant ones because we hope that eventually those pleasurable experiences will create a perfect and balanced life.
“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.”
What’s fascinating is that each person’s reaction to what happens in their world actually makes up these eight worldly Dharmas. Pema gives this example:
“Let’s take praise and blame. Someone walks up to us and says, ‘You are old’. If it just so happens that we want to be old, we feel really good. We feel as if we’ve just been praised. That gives us enormous pleasure and a sense of gain and fame. But suppose we have been obsessing all year about getting rid of wrinkles and firming up our jaw line. When someone says, ‘You are old,’ we feel insulted. We’ve just been blamed, and we feel a corresponding sense of pain.”
Your emotions are directly impacted by the way you interpret things and then you are usually swept away by these pleasant or unpleasant feelings. And before you know it, you fall into old habits and start creating storylines about how things should or shouldn’t be, what that person really meant when they said what they said or why you are right or wrong. Anxiety takes over and you are lost in thoughts that were created based on your attachment to these eight worldly Dharmas.
The key is to let go of your attachment to pleasure and avoidance of pain so that you can start to discover what’s behind the emotions. What you will find is a desire to know. You’ll want to know what causes your pain so you can stop running from it. And you’ll want to know what causes your pleasure so you can stop grasping for it.
My Go-To Way for Handling Anxious Thoughts
Personally, when I am having an anxious moment, it’s hard to stop my overthinking, and my chaotic mind so I can turn toward my fears with loving-kindness in order to investigate what is causing me pleasure or pain. So today I want to leave you with a key tool that helps me bring all these points together that I hope will do the same for you.
In the book, Pema teaches a meditation technique called “shamatha-vipashyana”, or “no more struggle”.
When you sit down to meditate, whatever arises in your mind you simply look at it directly and call it “thinking” and then bring your awareness back to your breath. Over and over again, you simply catch yourself caught in a thought and label it “thinking”. This is how you stop fighting with yourself. It’s a practice I started to use in meditation and now use in my life. Whenever I am caught in a thought that starts to take me down an anxiety hole, I work to catch myself by calling out “thinking”. It helps me stop struggling and relax into what is, as it is.
So there you have it. You now understand my interpretation of “When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times” by Pema Chödrön and how it relates to better managing your anxiety. There are so many other great teachings in this book that I want to encourage you to get a copy and dive in. Personally, I read this book cover to cover once a year and use it as a reference point whenever I’m struggling with anxiety. And of course, this book is all about dealing with the chaos of life, so the teachings can apply to other difficult times outside of anxious moments as well.
And one final note: personally I do not see this as a religious book. My view is that these Buddhist teachings are not about worshiping a creator god, but rather a means of changing yourself in order to develop the qualities of awareness, kindness, and wisdom. If you find that helpful, I hope you’ll download your own copy today!