Then they come together again and fall apart again. 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. “Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. When things fall apart…we have the opportunity to heal:
So even though we say the yama mara is fear of death, it’s actually fear of life.”īelow are a few examples of how we can reframe our fallen apartness as precious opportunities. Death is wanting to hold on to what you have and to have every experience confirm you and congratulate you and make you feel completely together. From the awakened point of view, that’s life. To live is to be willing to die over and over again. To live fully is to be always in no-man’s-land, to experience each moment as completely new and fresh. “To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. It is precisely these moments, however – “when the bottom falls out and we can’t find anything to grasp” – that provide us with incredible opportunities for growth and gain, if only we learn to embrace the fallen apartness, rather than resist it. Rather than realizing that it takes death for there to be birth, we just fight against the fear of death.” We’ve just lost our ground completely we are unable to hold it together and feel that we’re on top of things. “…disappointment, embarrassment, and all these places where we just cannot feel good are a sort of death. We expend precious energy charting our own course, creating an identity tethered to whatever fuels our ego, only to find ourselves in a situation where things fall apart – where the vicissitudes of life shatter the illusion that we are in control, stripping us of our polished self-image and propelling us into a state of chaos, uncertainty, doubt and despair.
Surely we have all felt “nailed by life” before. No matter how hard we try, it just won’t work.
There’s no way we can manipulate the situation to make ourselves come out looking good. “The most precious opportunity presents itself when we come to a place where we think we can’t handle whatever is happening. “Each day, we’re given many opportunities to open up or shutdown,” writes the American Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön in her book, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times(1997).
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