Obstacles are our friends: they teach us where we’re stuck.
PEMA CHODRONUsually we think that brave people have no fear. The truth is that they are intimate with fear.
More Pema Chodron Quotes
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If we learn to open our hearts, anyone, including the people who drive us crazy, can be our teacher.
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Don’t worry about achieving. Don’t worry about perfection. Just be there each moment as best you can.
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Resisting what is happening is a major cause of suffering.
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If you follow your heart, you’re going to find that it is often extremely inconvenient.
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Inner peace begins the moment you choose not to allow another person or event to control your emotions.
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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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Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing.
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All you need to know is that the future is wide open and you are about to create it by what you do.
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We can let the circumstances of our lives harden us so that we become increasingly resentful and afraid, or we can let them soften us and make us kinder and more open to what scares us. We always have this choice.
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It isn’t what happens to us that causes us to suffer; it’s what we say to ourselves about what happens.
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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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If someone comes along and shoots an arrow into your heart, it’s fruitless to stand there and yell at the person. It would be much better to turn your attention to the fact that there’s an arrow in your heart.
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When 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.
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Our true nature is like a precious jewel: although it may be temporarily buried in mud, it remains completely brilliant and unaffected. We simply have to uncover it.
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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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Since death is certain and the time of death is uncertain, what is the most important thing?
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We work on ourselves in order to help others, but also we help others in order to work on ourselves.
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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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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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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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Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible in us be found.
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You build inner strength through embracing the totality of your experience, both the delightful parts and the difficult parts.
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Rejoicing in ordinary things is not sentimental or trite. It actually takes guts. Each time we drop our complaints and allow everyday good fortune to inspire us, we enter the warrior’s world.
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The future is completely open and we are writing it moment to moment.
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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.
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Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know.
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