Top 454 Quotes & Sayings by Pema Chodron - Page 8

Maybe the most important teaching is to lighten up and relax. It's such a huge help in working with our crazy mixed-up minds to remember that what we're doing is unlocking a softness that is in us and letting it spread. We're letting it blur the sharp corners of self-criticism and complaint.

Everything is fresh, the essence of realization.

Blaming is a way to protect your heart, trying to protect what is soft and open and tender in yourself.

Like all explorers, we are drawn to discover what's out there without knowing yet if we have the courage to face it.

Life's work is to wake up, to let the things that enter your life wake you up rather than put you to sleep.

Discomfort of any kind becomes the basis for practice. We breathe in knowing our pain is shared.

Buddhist words such as compassion and emptiness don't mean much until we start cultivating our innate ability simply to be there with pain with an open heart and the willingness not to instantly try to get ground under our feet. For instance, if what we're feeling is rage, we usually assume that there are only two ways to relate to it. One is to blame others. Lay it all on somebody else; drive all blames into everyone else. The other alternative is to feel guilty about our rage and blame ourselves.

By becoming intimate with how we close down and how we open up, we awaken our unlimited potential.

When you open the door and invite in all sentient beings as your guests, you have to drop your agenda.

If you see a homeless person on the street, and they need food, housing, medical attention - if you can give that, do it. But at the same time, work with tonglen, because that is how you start dissolving the barrier between you and them.

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

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

Tonglen dissolves your solid sense of "I'm the wise person, I'm going to help this poor, unfortunate loser."

Just where you are-that's the place to start!

Meditation takes us just as we are, with our confusion and our sanity. This complete acceptance of ourselves as we are is called maitri, or unconditional friendliness, a simple, direct relationship with the way we are.

It's not a terrible thing that we feel fear when faced with the unknown. It is a part of being alive, something we all share. We react against the possibility of loneliness, of death, of not having anything to hold on to. Fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to the truth.

We practice to liberate ourselves from a burden.

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

The way I regard those who hurt me today will affect how I experience the world in the future. In any encounter, we have a choice: we can strengthen our resentment or our understanding and empathy. We can widen the gap between ourselves and others or lessen it.

we come to realize that other people's welfare is just as important as our own. In helping them, we help ourselves. In helping ourselves, we help the world.

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

Wholeheartedly do what it takes to awaken your clear-seeing intelligence, but one day at a time, one moment at a time. If we live that way, we will benefit this earth.

Cool loneliness allows us to look honestly and without aggressionat our own minds. We can gradually drop our ideals of who we think weought to be, or who we think we want to be, or who we think other peoplethink we want to be or ought to be. We give it up and just look directlywith compassion and humor at who we are. Then loneliness is no threat andheartache, no punishment.

It is only when we begin to relax with ourselves that meditation becomes a transformative process. Only when we relate with ourselves without moralizing, without harshness, without deception, can we let go of harmful patterns. Without maitri (metta), renunciation of old habits becomes abusive. This is an important point.

Tonglen is a way for you to be with people who need you - beginning with yourself.

People get into a heavy-duty sin and guilt trip, feeling that if things are going wrong, that means that they did something bad and they are being punished. That's not the idea at all.

One very powerful and effective way to work with this tendency to push away pain and hold on to pleasure is the practice of tonglen. ?In tonglen practice, when we see or feel suffering, we ?breathe in with the notion of completely feeling it, accepting it, and owning it.

Our neurosis and our wisdom are made out of the same material. If you throw out your neurosis, you also throw out your wisdom.

Finding the courage to go to the places that scare us cannot happen without compassionate inquiry into the workings of ego... Openness doesn't come from resisting our fears but from getting to know them well.

The Buddha taught that flexibility and openness bring strength and that running from groundlessness weakens us and brings pain. But do we understand that becoming familiar with the running away is the key? Openness doesn't come from resisting our fears but from getting to know them well

The more neurosis the more wisdom.

My moods are continuously shifting like the weather.

We don’t sit in meditation to become good meditators. We sit in meditation so that we’ll be more awake in our lives.

When we struggle agains our energy we reject the source of wisdom. Anger without the fixation is none other than clear-seeing wisdom. Pride without fixation is experienced as equanimity. The energy of passion when it's free of grasping is wisdom that sees all the angles.