Quotes from Pema Chodron

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.

Every challenge presents an opportunity for spiritual growth, whether it's a small irritation or when everything as you've known it falls apart.

Affirmations are like screaming that you're okay in order to overcome this whisper that you're not. That's a big contrast to actually uncovering the whisper, realizing that it's a passing memory, and moving closer to all those fears and all those edgy feelings that maybe you're not okay . Well, no big deal. None of us is okay and all of us are fine. We are walking, talking paradoxes.

According to this very simple teaching, becoming immersed in these four pairs of opposites—pleasure and pain, loss and gain, fame and disgrace, and praise and blame—is what keeps us stuck in the pain of samsara.

Meditation is a process of lightening up, of trusting the basic goodness of what we have and who we are, and of realizing that any wisdom that exists, exists in what we already have.

It manifests as inquisitiveness, as adaptability, as humor, as playfulness. It is our capacity to relax with not knowing, not figuring everything out, with not being at all sure about who we are—or who anyone else is either.

Every time we are willing to let the story line go, and every time we are willing to let go at the end of the out-breath, that's fundamentally renunciation: learning how to let go of holding on and holding back.

the same old demons will always come up until finally you have learned your lesson, the lesson they came to teach you.

Yet despite all our attachment, we know that the tide will inevitably come in and sweep the sand castle away. The trick is to enjoy it fully but without clinging, and when the time comes, let it dissolve back into the sea.

We can use our difficulties and problems to awaken our hearts.

Knowing pain is a very important ingredient of being there for another person. When you are feeling a lot of grief, you can look right into somebody's eyes because you feel you haven't got anything to lose—you're just there.

Then the young warrior said, "How can I defeat you?" Fear replied, "My weapons are that I talk fast, and I get very close to your face. Then you get completely unnerved, and you do whatever I say. If you don't do what I tell you, I have no power. You can listen to me, and you can have respect for me. You can even be convinced by me. But if you don't do what I say, I have no power." In that way, the student warrior learned how to defeat fear.

Once I had an opportunity to talk with Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche, about the fact that I was not able to do my practice properly. I had just started the vajrayana practices and I was supposed to be visualizing. I couldn't visualize anything. I tried and tried but there was just nothing at all; I felt like a fraud doing the practice because it didn't feel natural to me. (...). So he encouraged me by saying that as long as you have these kinds of doubts, your practice will be good.

The formal practice of loving-kindness or maitri has seven stages. We begin by engendering loving-kindness for ourselves and then expand it at out own pace to include loved ones, friends, neutral persons, those who irritate us, all of the above as a group, and finally, all beings throughout time and space. We gradually widen the circle of loving-kindness.

The reason we're often not there for others - whether for our child or our mother or someone who is insulting us or someone who frightens us - is that we're not there for ourselves.

If we want to learn about our future, we should look at what we're doing now.

Like a treasure found at home, enriching me without fatigue, you, my dear troublemaker, are the means by which a confused person like me will attain enlightenment.

Refraining—not habitually acting out impulsively—has something to do with giving up entertainment mentality. Through refraining, we see that there's something between the arising of the craving—or the aggression or the loneliness or whatever it might be—and whatever action we take as a result. There's something there in us that we don't want to experience, and we never do experience, because we're so quick to act.

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 its dynamic quality, that's called enlightenment, or awakening to our true nature, to our fundamental goodness. Another word for this is freedom—freedom from struggling against the fundamental ambiguity of being human.

WHEN we are training in the art of peace, we are not given any promises that because of our noble intentions everything will be okay.

Gradually we can begin to cherish the preciousness of our whole life just as it is, with its ups and downs, its failures and successes, its roughness and smoothness.

Sometimes you just have to let everything fall apart.

We train in the bodhichitta practices in order to become so open that we can take the pain of the world in, let it touch our hearts, and turn it into compassion.

The concepts of problem and solution can keep us stuck in thinking that there is an enemy and a saint or a right way and a wrong way.