In Love Hurts: Buddhist Advice for the Heartbroken, Rinzler uses his experiences holding sessions for the broken-hearted to lay out a path for coming to terms with rejection and unfulfilled expectations.
How did a Buddhist take on heartbreak become the idea for a book?
Over my years holding space and attending conferences, I’ve found that people want to get to the point where they have the perfect relationship—like that exists. And I’m the Debbie Downer Buddhist who points out, “By the way, at some point, the truth of impermanence says its going to end,” whether it’s a breakup, a divorce, or a death. The best resolution I can come up with is, well, you’re in some type of situation where you have a quick and painless death and, simultaneously, everyone you know and love dies as well somewhere else, and that way no one has to grieve anyone. That’s the best scenario for us to alleviate heartbreak. It was so juicy to talk about and hold space for conversations like that. I knew I wanted to do more. So the idea of meeting people and hearing their heartbreak... I knew that would fuel the book.
How did your residency at ABC Carpet and Home come about?
I did the launch party for my previous book there, just when I had signed on to write this book. I was also opening Mndfl [Rinzler’s meditation studio], and I knew I needed a writer’s retreat. I knew it wouldn’t do for me to remove myself from people to write about heartbreak. In the city, you throw a stone and there is someone going through a breakup, there’s someone who just lost a loved one. There are definitely people here heartbroken about the election.
How did you deal with your own vulnerabilities when deciding what to write?
With my early books there is a lot of dharma and very little of me, because I didn’t actually think people would be interested. I wrote my last book with my friend Meggan Watterson, who is all openness and vulnerability. She had to bring in more root text and I had to move away from references to traditional Buddhist teachings and share more of my personal experience. We met in the middle and it was really wonderful. For this book I carried that lesson right in. There’s no way to talk truly about heartbreak without being vulnerable yourself.
What is the connection between humor and getting through difficult circumstances?
Our emotional states are fluid and they change. We hold our stories too seriously, and we have to realize that this is not always going to be the way that we feel. When we drift off in meditation, we can beat ourselves up and continue to perpetuate self-aggression as a story line, or we can say, “This is hilarious: I’m sitting here playing out scenarios that haven’t happened yet, how ridiculous is my mind that it’s projecting all these things not based in reality?” We’re hilarious when you think about it—the way we psyche ourselves out. We have to be able to say, “I can just relax about this, this is ridiculous.”
