Use what seems like poison as medicine. Use your personal suffering as the path to compassion for all beings.
PEMA CHODRONNothing 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.
More Pema Chodron Quotes
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So many of us start along the spiritual path because we are suffering. But you must realize that for real healing to occur, there must first be deep compassion for yourself, especially the parts of yourself you dislike or consider ugly.
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You are the sky. Everything else – it’s just the weather.
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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.
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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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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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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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One of the deepest habitual patterns that we have is to feel that now is not enough.
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Let your curiosity be greater than your fear.
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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 are willing to stay even a moment with uncomfortable energy, we gradually learn not to fear it.
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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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Openness doesn’t come from resisting our fears but rather from getting to know them well.
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The truth you believe and cling to makes you unavailable to hear anything new.
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In meditation, you learn how to get out of your own way long enough for there to be room for your wisdom to manifest.
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Anything we experience, no matter how challenging, can become an open pathway to awakening.
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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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Obstacles are our friends: they teach us where we’re stuck.
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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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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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Whatever happens in your life, joyful or painful, do not be swept away by reactivity. Be patient with yourself and don’t lose your sense of perspective.
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So war and peace start in the human heart. Whether that heart is open or whether that heart closes has global implications.
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Resisting what is happening is a major cause of suffering.
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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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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 second noble truth says that this resistance is the mechanism of what we call ego, that resisting life causes suffering.
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