08/09/2026
This book is in my Top 5 and is one of the most influential books I have ever read. Like the author of this post, I also didnāt want to agree with Pema and her message for the first portion of the book. It is still one I return to and gain something new each time. ā¤ļøāš©¹ā¤ļøāš©¹
I am going to say something that might sound strange coming from someone about to recommend a book.
I spent the first thirty pages of this book disagreeing with Pema Chƶdrƶn.
I was desperately hoping that a Buddhist nun who has spent decades studying the human mind had somehow gotten it wrong. Because what she was saying, in the voice of someone who has clearly made peace with it, was something I was not ready to make peace with.
Here's the sentence that started the argument. She says the things falling apart in your life are not a malfunction. That the ground was never solid to begin with; you were never actually standing on anything, you'd just gotten remarkably good at not noticing.
She says the anxious, ungrounded feeling you're trying so hard to fix is not a problem to be solved. It's just what it feels like to be a person, accurately, for once, without the usual padding.
I did not want to hear that. I wanted solutions. I wanted five steps. I wanted someone to hand me the ground back. Pema, gently, yet infuriatingly, refuses. And it took me embarrassingly long to realize that refusal is the entire gift of this book.
Pema has this idea, unconditional friendship with yourself, and it sounds soft until you actually try to practise it, and then you realise it might be one of the hardest things a person can do. To meet your own fear, your own shame, your own spiralling 2 am thoughts, not with another wave of self-improvement, but with something closer to how you'd sit with a frightened child:
I see you. I'm not going anywhere.
She tells a story about a woman who kept having nightmares about monsters chasing her, invading her space. She tries everything to get rid of them: yelling at them, barricading the door, and trying to analyze them. Nothing works, until one night, exhausted, she turned around, looked the monsters in the eye, and said, I see you. You're not going away, so let's see what you have to teach me.
And the monsters froze. They had no idea what to do with someone who stopped running. I read that over and again because I knew exactly which monsters she was talking about. I have a few of my own that have been very comfortable chasing me for years, precisely because I never once turned around.
And then there's the line that I think about more than almost anything else I've read: nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know. I didn't want that to be true either. I wanted things to just go away, old grief, old patterns, old fears, through sheer avoidance, if necessary.
But avoidance, it turns out, is just a very elaborate waiting room. The thing doesn't leave. It just keeps tapping you on the shoulder, in slightly different outfits, until you finally look at it.
I need to tell you about the Audiobook.
Recently, I listened to it late at night, read by Christy Meyer. And something about hearing the ideas arrive as sound rather than text undid me in a completely new way. I lay in the dark and listened and felt the particular quality of being very quiet inside, which is rare for me and which Pema Chƶdrƶn seems, somehow, to make possible from beyond the page.
This is the book I return to, not because I've mastered anything in it. I very much have not. I still resist. I still want the five steps. I still, on bad days, run from the monsters instead of turning around.
But every single time I come back to these pages, something in me recognises the voice, the way you recognise an old friend who never asked you to be anything other than exactly what you are in that moment.
What "When Things Fall Apart" does to me, every time, is remind me that falling apart was never the emergency I thought it was, and that there is a way to be here, inside the mess, without needing it to be anything other than what it already is.
I don't know if I'll ever stop disagreeing with parts of it. I also don't know if I'll ever stop coming back.
And right now, that is the only endorsement that matters. Not what I thought when I read the first 30 pages. What I do when things fall apart.
I reach for this book. Every time.
BOOK: https://amzn.to/3SKwB1m
