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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.

Pema Chodron

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

Fear Open Ourselves Resistance
Feel the feelings and drop the story.
PEMA CHODRON

Feeling One Liner
The greatest obstacle to connecting with our joy is resentment.
PEMA CHODRON

Connection Greatness Joy Obstacle Ourselves
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
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.
PEMA CHODRON

Change Experience Grasp Meditation Ourselves Pattern Thinking
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.
PEMA CHODRON

Best Curiosity Instruction Life Morning Spiritual Wonder Yourself
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
If we learn to open our hearts, anyone, including the people who drive us crazy, can be our teacher.
PEMA CHODRON

Crazy Drive Heart Learning Open Ourselves People Teacher
Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing.
PEMA CHODRON

Fall Hard Time Healing Kind Perspective
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
Let difficulty transform you. And it will. In my experience, we just need help in learning how not to run away.
PEMA CHODRON

Difficult Experience Need Run Transformation Yourself
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
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
Appreciate everything, even the ordinary. Especially the ordinary.
PEMA CHODRON

Gratitude Ordinary Praise
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

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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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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