Pema Chodron Quotes

It's not a terrible thing that we feel fear when faced with the unknown. It is part of being alive, something we all share.

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

Determination means to use every challenge you meet as an opportunity to open your heart and soften, determined to not withdraw.

In the end, that's what we all need more than anything else: to be there for each other, in every kind of situation.

When we protect ourselves so we won't feel pain, that protection becomes like armor, like armor that imprisons the softness of of the heart.

In meditation, you learn how to get out of your own way long enough for there to be room for your wisdom to manifest

The biggest obstacle to taking a bigger perspective on life is that our emotions capture and blind us.

By the way that we think and by the way that we believe in things, in that way our world is created.

Peace isn’t an experience free of challenges, free of rough and smooth, it’s an experience that’s expansive enough to include all that arises without feeling threatened.

The only way to ease our pain is to experience it fully. Learn to stay with uneasiness, learn to stay with the tightening, so that the habitual chain reaction doesn't continue to rule your life.

We're afraid that this anger or sorrow or loneliness is going to last forever... Instead, acting it out is what makes it last.

The essence of practice is always the same: instead of falling prey to a chain reaction of revenge or self-hatred, we gradually learn to catch the emotional reaction and drop the story lines.

We feel that we have to be right so that we can feel good... The whole right and wrong business closes us down and makes our world smaller.

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.

If you aren't feeding the fire of anger or the fire of craving by talking to yourself, then the fire doesn't have anything to feed on.

Lower your standards and relax as it is.

We can drop the fundamental hope that there is a better "me" who one day will emerge. We can't just jump over ourselves as if we were not there.

Better to join in with humanity than to set ourselves apart.

Ordinarily we are swept away by habitual momentum and don't interrupt our patterns slightly. When we feel betrayed or disappointed, does it occur to us to practice?

We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don't really get solved. They come together and they fall apart.

The future is the result of what we do right now.

Fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to the truth

The first noble truth of the Buddha is that when we feel suffering, it doesn’t mean that something is wrong. What a relief.

We sow the seeds of our future hells or happiness by the way we open or close our minds right now.

If seeing that other person's pain brings up your fear or anger or confusion (which often happens), just start doing tonglen for yourself and all the other people who are stuck in the very same way.

The teacher will never give up on the student no matter how mixed up he or she might be

We tend to forget that we are part of the natural scheme of things.

The idea is to develop sympathy for your own confusion.

The trick is to keep exploring and not bail out, even when we find out that something is not what we thought.

Never underestimate the desire to bolt.

Right down there in the thick of things, we discover the love that will not die.

In truth, there is enormous space in which to live our everyday lives.

You see, there really is no separation between you and everyone else.

None of us is ever OK, but we all get through everything just fine.

A heartfelt sense of aspiring cuts through negativity about yourself; it cuts through the heavy trips you lay on yourself.

That nothing is static or fixed, that all is fleeting and impermanent, is the first mark of existence. Everything is in process.

Ego is something that you come to know - something that you befriend by not acting out or by repressing all the feelings that you feel.

We're not trying to be something we aren't; rather, we're reconnecting with who we are.

When things are shaky and nothing is working, we might realize that we are on the verge of something.

The approach is that the best way to use unwanted circumstances on the path of enlightenment is not to resist but to lean into them.

We don't experience the world fully unless we are willing to give everything away.

Meditation isn't really about getting rid of thoughts, it's about changing the pattern of grasping on to things, which in our everyday experience is our thoughts.

Are you experiencing restlessness? Stay! Are fear and loathing out of control? Stay! Aching knees and throbbing back? Stay! What's for lunch? Stay! I can't stand this another minute! Stay!

Sometimes we find that we like our thoughts so much that we don't want to let them go.

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.

It's helpful to remind yourself that meditation is about opening and relaxing with whatever arises, without picking and choosing.

The idea of karma is that you continually get the teaching that you need to open your heart.

Now is the only time. How we relate to it creates the future.

In practicing meditation, we're not trying to live up to some kind of ideal -- quite the opposite. We're just being with our experience, whatever it is.

Mindfulness is loving all the details of our lives, and awareness is the natural thing that happens: life begins to open up, and you realize that you're always standing at the center of the world.