Openness doesn’t come from resisting our fears but rather from getting to know them well.
PEMA CHODRONWhen things fall apart in your life, you feel as if your whole world is crumbling. But actually it’s your fixed identity that’s crumbling. And as Chögyam Trungpa used to tell us, that’s cause for celebration.
More Pema Chodron Quotes
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Let difficulty transform you. And it will. In my experience, we just need help in learning how not to run away.
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When we resist change, it’s called suffering. But when we can completely let go and not struggle against it, when we can embrace the groundlessness of our situation and relax into it’s dynamic quality, that’s called enlightenment.
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To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-man’s-land, to experience each moment as completely new and fresh. To live is to be willing to die over and over again.
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Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing.
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One of the deepest habitual patterns that we have is to feel that now is not enough.
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The best spiritual instruction is when you wake up in the morning and say, ‘I wonder what’s going to happen today.’ And then carry that kind of curiosity through your life.
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I can’t overestimate the importance of accepting ourselves exactly as we are right now, not as we wish we were or think we ought to be.
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Use what seems like poison as medicine. Use your personal suffering as the path to compassion for all beings.
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Resisting what is happening is a major cause of suffering.
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Feelings like disappointment, embarrassment, irritation, resentment, anger, jealousy, and fear, instead of being bad news, are actually very clear moments that teach us where it is that we’re holding back.
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Be kinder to yourself. And then let your kindness flood the world.
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The truth you believe and cling to makes you unavailable to hear anything new.
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As our kindness for ourselves grows, so does our kindness for other people.
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By the way that we think and by the way that we believe in things, in that way our world is created.
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Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know. Even if we run a hundred miles an hour to the other side of the continent, we find the very same problem awaiting us when we arrive.
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