The Buddhist Book You Should Read, Even If You’re Not Buddhist
Pema Chödrön, author of Welcoming the Unwelcome, at one of her teaching sessions, which can be viewed online.
(REVIEW) Pema Chödrön, an 83-year-old American Tibetan Buddhist nun, thinks you’re a good person. In fact, she thinks that everyone is a good person. Some just don't have an “awakened heart,” or to use the Buddhist term, bodhichitta.
In her new book Welcoming the Unwelcome, Chödrön moves past her usual style of writing in poetry and strict spiritual guidance and instead into a vulnerable teaching about how to overcome the pain of the world by explaining how she was led to do exactly that.
While there is no shortage of direction on how to attain the seemingly ever-elusive and amorphous Buddhist enlightenment, bodhi, Welcoming the Unwelcome is ultimately a personal essay about Chödrön’s own life and struggles with her faith. The thought of learning how to deal with personal struggles in a secular world from the first American ordained Buddhist nun seems ludicrous, but throughout the book, Chödrön reveals that she was once just a wandering, non-religious New Yorker.
Born into a Catholic family in 1936, she grew up in church, went to the University of California at Berkeley, got married young and started a family. She lived what she calls a mundane life. Chödrön thought she was happy, but then, on one evening at her home in New Mexico, her husband got out of his car, walked to where she was sitting in front of the house, and told her that he was having an affair and wanted a divorce.
“Wham! — life as I knew it had ended,” she writes. That was the first moment she can recall of feeling complete emptiness, or sunyata, even though she had not yet fallen into the study of Buddhism. Chödrön goes on to detail her battle against depression, and how using the Buddhist practice of leaning into suffering and uncomfort to find peace, to add to her bodhichitta.
Vulnerable anecdotes like this riddle the book. Chödrön has a way of mixing her understanding of the Buddhist practice, her personal life experiences, pop culture and historical events into a narrative that is messy and relatable, yet easy to understand.
She even brings up Beyoncé’s seeming perfection and the song “Pretty Hurts.” Between the synths and drums, lyrics like “We shine the light on whatever's worse / Perfection is a disease of a nation,” show true heartache. Even though Beyoncé did not write the song (Sia did), Chödrön says Beyoncé could not have sung that song with so much emotion if she had not felt that agony herself.
Chödrön uses this example as a way to discuss the idea of imputed meaning. In her words, “Instead of experiencing things simply as they are, our mind imputes extra layers of meaning onto them.”
“You” and “me” don’t exist. That is just an imputed meaning the the world has placed on the concept of self, according to Chödrön. In the theme of Beyoncé, the pain she feels when she sings “Pretty Hurts” is not hers alone. It’s just pain.
These huge existential musings based in the practice of Buddhism have the potential to feel incomprehensible, but Chödrön approaches them as casually as possible. Instead of spending hundreds of pages detailing the history of Buddhist beliefs and how to meditate, she just writes about her life and personal practices.
Chödrön brings a new voice to the seemingly strict and quiet world of Buddhism. Not pushing her religion on the reader or giving strict instructions on how to live, she simply urges people to welcome the unwelcome into their lives. But what does that mean concretely?
“It means understanding that, if we want to become fully awakened human beings, we have to learn how not to shy away from or reject any human experience,” she writes.
According to Chödrön, enlightenment is the complete understanding of one’s true self, and whether you believe in the Buddhist faith or not, “Welcoming the Unwelcome” is well worth the 147-page read.
Hadley Hitson is studying journalism at the University of Mississippi. She was part of the NYC Semester in Journalism (NYCJ) at The King’s College in NYC in the fall of 2019 and interned at Fortune magazine.