I’m participating in the #AtoZ April Blogging Challenge 2025 and this will be my third year of joining the vibrant community that loves this one-of-a-kind creative challenge.
This year, my theme is—BOOKS THAT HAVE CHANGED MY LIFE—which means they are not just my favourite books, but they’ve also left a deep and lasting impact on me and continue to do so until this day. I’m also blogging on my other blog—’TheSkyGirlMusings‘—and my theme there is THE A TO Z OF SELF CARE. Do check it out and follow me there, if you are new to it. If you leave your blog link, I’ll be happy to follow you back too. 🙂
The Places That Scare You By Pema Chödrön
I read When Things Fall Apart nearly three years ago, when I was going through a very rough time. I read it on a really turbulent flight, to my hometown, along with mum next to me. We were on our way to visit our family home for the very last time.
It was such an emotional time for both of us…I felt really turbulent—both inside and out and, suddenly, mid-air, while the aircraft was flying at around 33,000 feet or so, I was stricken by sheer panic and could hardly breathe. It was quite by fluke, that I had picked up Pema’s book before leaving for the airport that morning and I still recall how her words had given me the strength and the courage to accept everything that life was throwing at me. For weeks, after we were back, I felt grateful that I had this book with me that night.
The companion book to When Things Fall Apart is The Places That Scare You, which I finished reading last year—again, came at a time of a personal crisis.
In a nutshell, The Places That Scare You is all about choice. As Pema teaches us—We can let the circumstances of our lives harden us and make us increasingly resentful and afraid, or we can let them soften us and make us kinder. To this wisdom, Pema also shares the tools to deal with the problems and difficulties that life throws our way. It is the wisdom that we never realise we already have within, because our impulse is to block it with habitual patterns, which are again, rooted in fear. Beyond that fear, is what she describes—a state of open heartedness and tenderness, which is where we must arrive.
Pema’s words, are not only refreshing but they are also challenging. She makes us “see” problems as spiritual opportunities. Rather than run from discomfort, she advises us to stay put and learn more about ourselves. To me, this piece of advice is both scary and relieving, depending on how I find myself at any given moment in time.
Pema is like the teacher who nudges us to feel and observe our discomforts, and become more fully present in our lives. She reminds us that, this is how we can learn to exist fully in the here and now. Looking for short-term relief is always temporary. According to her, by diving deeply into whatever challenges life throws at us, we can experience the deep joy of being alive.
What she suggests might not sound easy to many of us, but her rationale is this—it is really fear that makes love difficult—because fear immobilizes us, makes us pull the covers over our heads, and isolates us from ourselves and the others.
In this book, Pema also encourages the consistent practice of meditation. But, she has a very different take on it, because, she points out that as we confront our true selves in meditation, it often becomes more and more difficult.
As a practitioner of meditation myself, I couldn’t but nod along, when she describes the struggles we face with overcoming difficult emotions. Here, Pema recommends the practice of ‘tonglen‘—a simple spiritual ritual that can be done anywhere and anytime—providing a dramatic and freeing shift in our emotional perspective. It works by teaching us not to let disappointment, anger, and hurt trigger our personal melodramas, that sap our energy. Instead, we often find ourselves in that place that is in-between—one that challenges us no less and makes us doubtful of ourselves. In Pema’s words:
“We are told about the pain of chasing after pleasure and futility of running from pain. We hear about the joy of awakening, of realizing our interconnectedness, of trusting the openness of our hearts and minds. But we are not told all that much about this state of being in-between, no longer able to get our old comfort from outside but not yet dwelling in a continual sense of equanimity and warmth. Anxiety, heartbreak and tenderness mark the in-between state. It is the kind of place we usually want to avoid. The challenge is to stay in the middle rather than buy into struggle and complaint.”
So, how does one deal with this?
According to Pema, we must allow the challenge to soften us, rather than make us more rigid and afraid. Once we are comfortable with this uneasy feeling and brave enough to stay in the middle of nowhere, compassion arises spontaneously:
“By not knowing, not hoping to know, and not acting like we know what is happening, we begin to access our inner strength.”
To sum up, the book can mean two very different things to people—comforting or terrifying— depending on one’s perspective at the time of reading it. However, one thing is for certain, once we learn to accept the impermanence of life, it can be simultaneously freeing and unnerving.
This is a book that I keep coming back to, over and over again, as challenges keep resurfacing in my life—hopefully, less fearful and more accepting of the inevitability of pain, loss and death, with every reading.
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If you’d like to read the rest of my A to Z posts written for the #AtoZAprilChallenge2025, then please click here to read on.