Wake-Up Call

Storms Can’t Hurt the Sky: A Buddhist Path through Divorce
Gabriel Cohen
New York: Da Capo Press, 2008
267 pp., $14.95 (paper)

Divorce is not for the fainthearted. While some divorces may be smooth and nonadversarial, others are extremely stressful, marked by episodes of anger, despair, nightmares, and flashbacks. Most of us would rather avoid the whole thing. Yet we don’t.

The latest figures show that some 40 percent of marriages in the United States end in divorce. That’s a lot of people, since nine in ten of us eventually tie the knot. It’s curious how we continue to marry despite the odds, like young people who think they’ll never die. Sickness, old age, death—and relational conflict: they’re inevitable, and we need to learn how to deal with them all.

Recognizing the First Noble Truth of divorce—that we’re not alone in our suffering—should provide a sense of comfort when it happens. Yet most of us feel desperately alone, and we add insult to injury by blaming ourselves and our exes long after the fact. When the going gets tough, we need kindly companions. More than one person has told me that Crazy Time, a compassionate guide to divorce by Abigail Trafford, may have kept them alive through the darkest periods of the process. Now, in Storms Can’t Hurt the Sky, Gabriel Cohen has written a generous book in the same vein, with a bonus: he uses the confusion and heartache of his own divorce as a “test laboratory” of Buddhist insight.

Cohen didn’t start out as a Buddhist, but when his wife abruptly walked out after four years together, he was stricken with anger and grief. He found himself at a Buddhist lecture, “How to Deal with Anger,” near his home in Brooklyn, New York, fearing the worst—some foreign-sounding, cult-like mumbo-jumbo. What he actually heard was sensible psychology. The speaker, Matthew, explained that our experience of the world comes from within and that our anger and sadness are caused less by external events than by the workings of our own minds: “There are many things we can’t change about the world, but we can change the way our mind perceives and reacts to them.” Cohen started to see that his anger was a choice and that he didn’t have to be saddled with it forever. Thus began an inner adventure told with humor and disarming candor. Cohen describes himself as a “rookie” in Buddhism, but we can just as easily read his explorations as “beginner’s mind.”

He leads us through the core concepts of Buddhism, especially the Four Noble Truths and the Three Poisons—anger, greed and ignorance. The First Noble Truth of suffering? Cohen discovered that the apartment he rented after his marriage fell apart was formerly inhabited by a man who had killed his wife in the bathroom. “How does love turn to such hatred?” Cohen wonders. (Answer: The poison of greed, or “desirous attachment.”) And what new snares does the freshly minted divorcé lay down as he eagerly anticipates his next hot date? “I noticed I could look at someone from a block away and instantly decide whether they appealed to me.” The chapter in which that remark appears is titled “Attachment at First Sight,” but the book also includes compelling examples of remarkable selflessness—the path to freedom—that I will not spoil by describing here.

Storms Can’t Hurt the Sky is organized into short, readable chapters. We come to care about the author. He has a guileless quality—like the country music he loves—that draws us in. We can empathize, for example, as Cohen fumbles an email exchange with his ex, leaking anger and resentment despite his valiant efforts to internalize Buddhist insights.

To fix their marriage, the author and his wife tried psychotherapy, together and alone. Cohen was especially frustrated with his seven months of weekly individual therapy. Sessions often left him feeling “vaguely uneasy and isolated,” even as his marriage was “going down in flames.” Cohen isn’t knocking therapy: it’s helped him in the past, he says. In this instance, however, it compares unfavorably with his Buddhist experience: sitting with a group of people dealing not with their individual problems but with their “common problems as human beings. Everyone wants to avoid suffering. Everyone wants to be happy.”

One of the strongest points this book makes concerns the Third Poison: ignorance. When we suffer, our vision narrows around our personal grievances, and it’s hard to recognize the good (or at least neutral) intentions of our partners. We develop “enemy mind.” As a Buddhist practitioner Cohen met at one of his talks explained, “They loved each other, and now—all of a sudden—they’re saying, ‘That person was such a bitch!’ For them to feel okay, the other person has to be the bad guy… I think that enemy mind comes out of a belief that the other person is trying to infiltrate and hurt you.” An advanced stage of enemy mind is “petrified mind,” or as Cohen says about his own marriage, “we were so sure the other was to blame that we had turned our marriage to stone.”

The author offers practical suggestions for people in difficult relationships. He recommends different forms of meditation to develop mindful awareness and compassion—none more strongly than tonglen, Taking and Giving: “Personally, I have found the meditation on taking and giving—the one in which you imagine yourself drawing in your partner’s suffering as black smoke, and you breathe clear light toward them—to be the most effective way to break out of my own loops of bitterness and resentment.” In my own experience as a couples therapist, I, too, have seen the power of tonglen. This simple meditation has a way of gently and safely opening us to relational pain, which reduces defensiveness and evokes compassion, allowing us to feel connected even in the midst of a struggle.

After reading this evocative and illuminating memoir-cum-guidebook, I was left with two reflections on surviving divorce. One regards the importance of self-compassion. There is much emphasis in the book on the evils of self-cherishing—the tendency to see ourselves as the center of the universe, the relentless “I” in “I love you.” Cohen suggests compassion for others as an antidote. But when we’re in the deeply disturbing emotions of divorce—rage, despair, confusion—we need to back up and first give ourselves compassion. We need to embrace our own pain, especially the pain of disconnection, before we can give kindness to others.

My other reflection is on progress and disappointment. After a brief lapse in his efforts to be mindful of anger toward his ex-wife, Cohen wisely noted that “Buddhism is not about figuring everything out, or about being perfect…It’s a practice. And it requires courage, persistence, and great patience.”

The skeptical reader may well ask, “Why do I need Buddhism to cope with divorce? Can’t I figure it out on my own, or let time heal all wounds?” I’m reminded of a story I heard while I was staying at an ashram in India. A student asked the teacher, “Why are so many unpleasant people around you here at the ashram?” The teacher replied, “Imagine what they’d be like if they weren’t here!” A Buddhist perspective can indeed provide refuge at a low point in our lives, and it allows something essential to unfold: a deeper understanding of the fleeting nature of our lives, a more fluid sense of personal identity, and a compassionate response to suffering in oneself and others.

Storms Can’t Hurt the Sky is an invitation to Buddhist practice. It doesn’t assume that every reader will meditate, but it does the next best thing, offering up Buddhist insights in stories and parables. Stories teach by slipping around the resistant, rational mind, and Gabriel Cohen has a knack for seamlessly weaving together conceptual material and personal anecdotes. In the end, the book speaks not only to people struggling through the trauma of divorce but also to anyone interested in how Buddhist teachings apply to everyday life.

Christopher Germer is a clinical psychologist, a clinical instructor at Harvard Medical School, and co-editor of Mindfulness and Psychotherapy.

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