Not everything goes smoothly everyday or in our life history. However, it seems to be a fact that painful situations have the capacity to help us reflect better than pleasant occasions when everything is going smoothly and positively. Indeed, our quest for an easy life without change is a mistaken one, as change is inevitable, even on a daily level. Wisdom comes when we begin to see that our full growth can include holding the painful aspects of our lives in awareness and not pushing them away, as our natural instinct sometimes demands. It is not only pleasant insights that lead to growth. To grow whole we have to go beneath the surface of neat appearance and enter deeply into our hearts and our history.

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 Chodron