Pema Chodron Quotes

It isn't the things that are happening to us that cause us to suffer, it's what we say to ourselves about the things that are happening. The truth you believe and cling to makes you unavailable to hear anything new.

Suffering begins to dissolve when we can question the belief or the hope that there's anywhere to hide.

Sticking with that uncertainty, getting the knack of relaxing in the midst of chaos, learning not to panic-this is the spiritual path.

Things are as bad and as good as they seem. There's no need to add anything extra.

One of the main discoveries of meditation is seeing how we continually run away from the present moment, how we avoid being here just as we are. That’s not considered to be a problem. The point is to see it.

We can put our whole heart into whatever we do; but if we freeze our attitude into for or against, we're setting ourselves up for stress. Instead, we could just go forward with curiosity, wondering where this experiment will lead. This kind of open-ended inquisitiveness captures the spirit of enthusiasm, or heroic perseverance.

We don't set out to save the world; we set out to wonder how other people are doing and to reflect on how our actions affect other people's hearts.

One way to practice staying present is to simply sit still for a while and listen. For one minute, listen to the sounds close to you. For one minute, listen to the sounds at a distance. Just listen attentively.

If you work with your mind, instead of trying to change everything on the outside, that's how your temper will cool down.

The second noble truth says that this resistance is the...mechanism of what we call ego, that resisting life causes suffering.

Fear itself is the vanguard of wisdom

This genuine heart of sadness can teach us great compassion. It can humble us when we're arrogant and soften us when we are unkind.

A warrior accepts that we can never know what will happen to us next.

When we scratch the wound and give into our addictions we do not allow the wound to heal.

The most difficult times for many of us are the ones we give ourselves.

Never underestimate the power of compassionately recognizing what's going on.

Meditation practice isn't about trying to throw ourselves away and become something better. It's about befriending who we are already.

Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know.

Relaxing with something as familiar as loneliness is good discipline for realizing the profundity of the unresolved moments of our lives. We are cheating ourselves when we run away from the ambiguity of loneliness.....Rather than persecuting yourself or feeling that something terribly wrong is happening, right there in the moment of sadness and longing, could you relax and touch the limitless space of the human heart?

The third noble truth says that the cessation of suffering is letting go of holding on to ourselves.

Compassion practice is daring. It involves learning to relax and allowing ourselves to move gently toward what scares us.

Never underestimate the desire to bolt.

When you begin to touch your heart or let your heart be touched, you begin to discover that it's bottomless, that it doesn't have any resolution, that this heart is huge, vast, and limitless. You begin to discover how much warmth and gentleness is there, as well as how much space.

Opening to the world begins to benefit ourselves and others simultaneously. The more we relate with others, the more quickly we discover where we're blocked.

It has a lot to do with developing patience, not with the check-out person so much, but with your own pain that arises, the rawness and the vulnerability, and sending some kind of warmth and love to that rawness and soreness. I think that's how we have to practice.

On the journey of the warrior-bodhisattva, the path goes down, not up, as if the mountain pointed toward the earth instead of the sky. Instead of transcending the suffering of all creatures, we move toward turbulence and doubt however we can. We explore the reality and unpredictability of insecurity and pain, and we try not to push it away. If it takes years, if it takes lifetimes, we let it be as it is. At our own pace, without speed or aggression, we move down and down and down. With us move millions of others, companions in awakening from fear.

Let difficulty transform you. And it will. In my experience, we just need help in learning how not to run away.

The trick is to keep exploring and not bail out, even when we find out that something is not what we thought. That's what we're going to discover again and again and again. Nothing is what we thought. I can say that with great confidence. Emptiness is not what we thought. Neither is mindfulness or fear. Compassion––not what we thought. Love. Buddha nature. Courage. These are code words for things we don't know in our minds, but any of us could experience them. These are words that point to what life really is when we let things fall apart and let ourselves be nailed to the present moment.

All you need to know is that the future is wide open and you are about to create it by what you do.

At some point, we realize that what we do for ourselves benefits others, and what we do for others benefits us.

Words themselves are neutral. It's the charge we add to them that matters

To put it concisely, we suffer when we resist the noble and irrefutable truth of impermanence and death.

In order to have compassion for others, we have to have compassion for ourselves.

Simply be present with your own shifting energies and with the unpredictabilit y of life as it unfolds.

Once you create a self-justifying storyline, your emotional entrapment within it quadruples.

Underneath our ordinary lives, underneath all the talking we do, all the moving we do, all the thoughts in our minds, there's a fundamental groundlessness. It's there bubbling along all the time. We experience it as restlessness and edginess. We experience it as fear. It motivates passion, aggression, ignorance, jealousy, and pride, but we never get down to the essence of it.

We can gradually drop our ideals of who we think we ought to be, or who we think we want to be, or who we think other people think we want to be or ought to be.

Patience has nothing to do with suppression. In fact, it has everything to do with a gentle, honest relationship with yourself.

It isn't what happens to us that causes us to suffer; it's what we say to ourselves about what happens.

The future is completely open and we are writing it moment to moment.

So many of us start along the spiritual path because we are suffering. But you must realize that for real healing to occur, there must first be deep compassion for yourself, especially the parts of yourself you dislike or consider ugly.

Until we stop clinging to the concept of good and evil, the world will continue to manifest as friendly goddesses and harmful demons.

If you work with your mind, that will alleviate all the suffering that seems to come from the outside.

When we practice generating compassion, we can expect to experience our fear of pain. Compassion practice is daring. It involves learning to relax and allow ourselves to move gently toward what scares us. The trick to doing this is to stay with emotional distress without tightening into aversion, to let fear soften us rather than harden into resistance.

You must learn to sit with the restless, painful energy and not let the momentum pull you under and cause you to do the same thing over and over that's ruining your life and the lives of those around you.

Hope and fear come from feeling that we lack something; they come from a sense of poverty. We can’t simply relax with ourselves. We hold on to hope, and hope robs us of the present moment. We feel that someone else knows what is going on, but that there is something missing in us, and therefore something is lacking in our world.

Rather than going after our walls and barriers with a sledgehammer, we pay attention to them. With gentleness and honesty, we move closer to those walls. We touch them and smell them and get to know them well. We begin a process of acknowledging our aversions and our cravings. We become familiar with the strategies and beliefs we use to build the walls: What are the stories I tell myself? What repels me and what attracts me? We start to get curious about what’s going on.

Each of us has a "soft spot": the place in our experience where we feel vulnerable and tender. This soft spot is inherent in appreciation and love, and it is equally inherent in pain.