The central question of a warrior’s training is not how we avoid uncertainty and fear but how we relate to discomfort.
PEMA CHODRONThe second noble truth says that this resistance is the mechanism of what we call ego, that resisting life causes suffering.
More Pema Chodron Quotes
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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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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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All situations teach you, and often it’s the tough ones that teach you best.
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We have a choice. We can spend our whole life suffering because we can’t relax with how things really are, or we can relax and embrace the open-endedness of the human situation, which is fresh, unfixated, unbiased.
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In the end, that’s what we all need more than anything else: to be there for each other, in every kind of situation.
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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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There’s nothing more important on our spiritual path than developing gentleness to oneself.
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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.
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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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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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Usually we think that brave people have no fear. The truth is that they are intimate with fear.
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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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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 are the sky. Everything else – it’s just the weather.
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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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