Mentions personal use of When Things Fall Apart.

Transcript context

…One of those ends up being Buddha, and one of those ends up being Andy Johns. Yeah, or another popular figure in Western spirituality is Pema Chödrön, who she's got a lot of great books. One of them is titled When Things Fall Apart, some of the first books I read when things fell apart for me. Her story, actually, she used to live in Berkeley, I think, but an American woman. She was married. First marriage didn't work out. She got married again. Second one didn't work out. It ended in somewhat sudden and expected and catastrophic fashion. Here she is with a few children and a broken heart again and deep emotional suffering, and that suffering was so great that it led her to ultimately say, "I must pursue these teachings and this spiritual tradition that I'm starting to wake up to in the Eastern traditions," with Buddhism in particular because she had suffered so much that she needed to find liberation from that. In her case, that even meant separating, not all the time, but a significant portion of her time away from her own children who, if I recall correctly, were early teens timeframe. Now, I think that Pema Chödrön is the only female Buddhist nun in all of North America and is a very well-known spiritual teacher. I also think her journey was somewhere around seven or eight years. Again, that's just the valley between two mountains. Truthfully, the journey continues for the rest of your life, but just another example I wanted to share. There's some obvious reasons why going down this path is difficult, why making change is hard. What else would you say holds people back from making a big change in their life, and maybe on the flip side is just how do you allow change to happen?…

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