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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.

Pema Chodron

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.
PEMA CHODRON

Alive Awake Death Experience Human Live Man Moments Willing
Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible in us be found.
PEMA CHODRON

Destruction Expose Ourselves
Resisting what is happening is a major cause of suffering.
PEMA CHODRON

Pain Resistance Suffering
Don’t worry about achieving. Don’t worry about perfection. Just be there each moment as best you can.
PEMA CHODRON

Achievement Best Moments Perfection Worry Yourself
Feeling irritated, restless, afraid, and hopeless is a reminder to listen more carefully.
PEMA CHODRON

Care Feeling Hope Irritation Listening Reminder
Usually we think that brave people have no fear. The truth is that they are intimate with fear.
PEMA CHODRON

Brave Courage Fear Inspirational People Thinking
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.
PEMA CHODRON

Arrive Need Problem Run Teaching
You are the sky. Everything else – it’s just the weather.
PEMA CHODRON

Sky Yourself
Inner peace begins the moment you choose not to allow another person or event to control your emotions.
PEMA CHODRON

Choice Control Person Moments Peace Yourself
Each person’s life is like a mandala – a vast, limitless circle. We stand in the center of our own circle, and everything we see, hear and think forms the mandala of our life … everything that shows up in your mandala is a vehicle for your awakening.
PEMA CHODRON

Awake Life Limitation Person Stand Thinking Vehicle Yourself
The greatest obstacle to connecting with our joy is resentment.
PEMA CHODRON

Connection Greatness Joy Obstacle Ourselves
Be kinder to yourself. And then let your kindness flood the world.
PEMA CHODRON

Compassionate Kind World Yourself
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.
PEMA CHODRON

Choice Embrace Human Life Ourselves Situation Suffering
Anything we experience, no matter how challenging, can become an open pathway to awakening.
PEMA CHODRON

Awake Challenge Experience Open Path Spiritual
You build inner strength through embracing the totality of your experience, both the delightful parts and the difficult parts.
PEMA CHODRON

Build Delight Difficult Experience Strength Yourself
It isn’t what happens to us that causes us to suffer; it’s what we say to ourselves about what happens.
PEMA CHODRON

Hard Time Ourselves Reaction Suffering

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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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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