Top 454 Quotes & Sayings by Pema Chodron - Page 6

Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It’s a relationship between equals.

When we touch the center of sorrow, when we sit with discomfort without trying to fix it, when we stay present to the pain of disapproval or betrayal and let it soften us, these are times that we connect with bohdichitta.

Don’t get caught up in hopes of what you’ll achieve and how good your situation will be some day in the future. What you do right now is what matters.

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

This very moment is the perfect teacher, and, lucky for us, it's with us wherever we go.

The still lake without ripples is an image of our minds at ease, so full of unlimited friendliness for all the junk at the bottom of the lake that we don't feel the need to churn up the waters just to avoid looking at what's there.

We are one blink of an eye away from being fully awake

Impermanence is a principle of harmony. When we don't struggle against it, we are in harmony with reality.

It's said that when we die, the four elements - earth, air, fire and water - dissolve one by one, each into the other, and finally just dissolve into space. But while we're living, we share the energy that makes everything, from a blade of grass to an elephant, grow and live and then inevitably wear out and die. This energy, this life force, creates the whole world.

Softening what is rigid in our hearts.

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

While we are sitting in meditation, we are simply exploring humanity and all of creation in the form of ourselves.

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

What's encouraging about meditation is that, even if we shut down, we can no longer shut down in ignorance. We see very clearly that we're closing off. That in itself begins to illuminate the darkness of ignorance.

Meditation practice isn’t about trying to throw ourselves away and become something better. It’s about befriending who we are already. The ground of practice is you or me or whoever we are right now, just as we are. That’s the ground, that’s what we study, that’s what we come to know with tremendous curiosity and interest.

This is the tendency of all living things: to avoid pain and to cling to pleasure.

Gloriousness and wretchedness need each other. One inspires us, the other softens us.

Every moment is incredibly unique and fresh, and when we drop into the moment, as meditation allows us to do, we learn how to truly taste this tender and mysterious life that we share together.

Everybody loves something, even if it's only tortillas.

Compassion starts with making friends with ourselves.

When we feel left out, inadequate, or lonely, can we take a warrior’s perspective and contact bodhichitta?

The happiness we seek cannot be found through grasping, trying to hold on to things. It cannot be found through getting serious and uptight about wanting things to go in the direction we think will bring happiness. We are always taking hold of the wrong end of the stick. The point is that the happiness we seek is already here and it will be found through relaxation and letting go rather than through struggle.

Searching for happiness prevents us from ever finding it.

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.

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.

When people are hurting, what they really need is someone who is fully there for them - not someone who is condescending or officious. The only way for you to be there for them is by facing your fear or anger, whatever feelings cause you to shut down.

Rather than becoming more relaxed, you start pulling down the shades and locking the door. When you do go out, you find the experience more and more unsettling and disagreeable. You become touchier, more fearful, more irritable than ever. The more you try to get it your way, the less you feel at home.

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

There isn't anything except your own life that can be used as ground for your spiritual practice. Spiritual practice is your life, twenty-four hours a day.

Nothing in its essence is one way or the other.

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.

The very first noble truth of the Buddha points out that suffering is inevitable for human beings as long as we believe that things last—that they don’t disintegrate, that they can be counted on to satisfy our hunger for security.

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.

Whatever you are doing, take the attitude of wanting it directly or indirectly to benefit others. Take the attitude of wanting it to increase your experience of kinship with your fellow beings.

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.

Fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to the truth

It's also helpful to realize that this very body that we have, that's sitting right here right now... with its aches and it pleasures... is exactly what we need to be fully human, fully awake, fully alive.

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

The root of compassion, is compassion for oneself.

If we knew that tonight we were going to go blind, we would take a long, last real look at every blade of grass, every cloud formation, every speck of dust, every rainbow, raindrop-everything.

As we learn to have compassion for ourselves, the circle of compassion for others - what and whom we can work with, and how - becomes wider.

Patience takes courage. It is not an ideal state of calm. In fact, when we practice patience we will see our agitation far more clearly.

If you look back at history or you look at any place in the world where religious groups or ethnic groups or racial groups or political groups are killing each other, or families have been feuding for years and years, you can see - because you're not particularly invested in that particular argument - that there will never be peace until somebody softens what is rigid in their heart.

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

Enlightenment is a direct experience with reality.

Whole-heartedn ess is a precious gift, but no one can actually give it to you. You have to find the path that has heart and then walk it impeccably....It' s like someone laughing in your ear, challenging you to figure out what to do when you don't know what to do. It humbles you. It opens your heart.

True compassion does not come from wanting to help out those less fortunate than ourselves but from realizing our kinship with all beings.

There's a reason you can learn from everything: you have basic wisdom, basic intelligence, and basic goodness.

Fear is a natural reaction of moving closer to the truth. If we commit ourselves to staying right where we are, then our experience becomes very vivid. Things become very clear when there is nowhere to escape.

At least once a year, I imagine that I am about to die. Looking back as truthfully as I can at my entire life, I give full attention to the things I wish hadn’t occurred. Recognizing these mistakes honestly but without self-recrimination, I try to rejoice in the innate wisdom that allows me to see so bravely, and I feel compassion for how I so frequently messed up. Then I can go forward. The future is wide open, and what I do with it is up to me.

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

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

What if rather than being disheartened by the ambiguity, the uncertainty of life, we accepted it and relaxed into it?

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.

Compassionate action involves working with ourselves as much as working with others.

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

The more we witness our emotional reactions and understand how they work, the easier it is to refrain.

To lead a life that goes beyond pettiness and prejudice and always wanting to make sure that everything turns out on our own terms, to lead a more passionate, full, and delightful life than that, we must realize that we can endure a lot of pain and pleasure for the sake of finding out who we are and what this world is...

A further sign of health is that we don't become undone by fear and trembling, but we take it as a message that it's time to stop struggling and look directly at what's threatening us.

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