In difficult times, it is only bodhichitta that heals. When inspiration has become hidden, when we feel ready to give up, this is the time when healing can be found in the tenderness of the pain itself. This is the time to touch the genuine heart of the bodhichitta.

Pema Chodron

Chapter 14, The Love That Will Not Die,” in Pema Chodron’s When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice For Difficult Times talks about discovering the bodhichitta within ourselves. Chodron describes, “Bodhichitta is a Sanskrit word that means “noble or awakened heart. … We awaken this bodhichitta, this tenderness for life, when we can longer shield ourselves from the vulnerability of our condition, from the basic fragility of existence. In the words of the sixteenth Gyalwa Karma, ‘You take it all in. You let the pain of the world touch your heart and you turn it in to compassion.’ .”

The concept of bodhichitta keeps presenting itself to me, in different ways, across many of the books that have “fallen” from my bookshelf the last few months. That reveals an element of truth for me to find. The idea that we are asked to look inward to heal, and that there is communion and strength with one another in our pain feels true to me. In that frame, bodhichitta is our inner teacher. Also, bodhichitta refers to a fundamental interconnectedness between people that can be accessed by us all if we turn inward, breathe, and turn outward toward one another. Interconnectedness, and our natural ability to act lovingly, are ultimately and infinitely stronger than cruelty and darkness.

Here is how I understand bodhichitta. In recent months, my heart has been broken by the stories of more than 200,000 families in the United States who have lost loved ones to Covid-19. I think about family separation at our border. I think about gun violence and systemic racism. The corners of my heart that feels this pain is bodhichitta.

There is hope in the pain. The same knowing that allows me to feel the pain of others lives in every heart. From there we love. That being so, we can each turn inward and use our pain to heal ourselves and one another. This is the continued practice of breathing into, and not running from, the pain of the world and then allowing that breath to turn into compassionate action in the world. That is what, I believe, Chodron is talking about when she offers that it is the times when we want to give up, when pain feels too profound, that true healing is possible.