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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.

Pema Chodron

The central question of a warrior’s training is not how we avoid uncertainty and fear but how we relate to discomfort.
PEMA CHODRON

Avoid Certain Comfortable Question Training Warrior
Use what seems like poison as medicine. Use your personal suffering as the path to compassion for all beings.
PEMA CHODRON

Compassionate Medicine Personal Poison Suffering Yourself
One of the deepest habitual patterns that we have is to feel that now is not enough.
PEMA CHODRON

Deep Enough Feeling Oneself Pattern
Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing.
PEMA CHODRON

Fall Hard Time Healing Kind Perspective
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.
PEMA CHODRON

Celebration Fall Identity Life World Yourself
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.
PEMA CHODRON

Believe Suffering Truth 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 future is completely open and we are writing it moment to moment.
PEMA CHODRON

Future Moments Open Writing
Openness doesn’t come from resisting our fears but rather from getting to know them well.
PEMA CHODRON

Fear Open Ourselves Resistance
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.
PEMA CHODRON

Brilliant Bury Jewel Nature Simplicity Temporary True
In the end, that’s what we all need more than anything else: to be there for each other, in every kind of situation.
PEMA CHODRON

End Kind Situation Support Togetherness
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
The essence of generosity is letting go. Pain is always a sign that we are holding on to something – usually ourselves.
PEMA CHODRON

Essence Generosity Ourselves Pain Sign
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.
PEMA CHODRON

Choice Circumstance Hard Kind Life Open Scare
Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know.
PEMA CHODRON

Need Spiritual Teaching Wisdom
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

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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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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