Quotes from Pema Chodron

learned that a person can only take so much. He found that taking on suffering had to be balanced with love and kindness, with the completeness of life.

The towns and countryside that the traveler sees through a train window do not slow down the train, nor does the train affect them. Neither disturbs the other. This is how you should see the thoughts that pass through your mind when you meditate. —DILGO KHYENTSE RINPOCHE

Before we can heal others with our speech, we need to get a handle on our own mind and its propensities.

Chögyam Trungpa put it, "Sanity is permanent, neurosis is temporary.

The Buddha taught that all beings have the potential to wake up completely, and that all of us will eventually get there. He and many other wise people in this world have given us tools for taking whatever occurs in our lives and using it to cultivate our basic goodness and become more and more able to be there for others. Whatever the future brings—welcome or unwelcome—we can use on our path of awakening. To me, this attitude is the best kind of optimism.

Openness doesn't come from resisting our fears but from getting to know them well.

Wherever you go for the rest of your life, you're always in the middle of the universe and the circle is always around you. Everyone who walks up to you has entered that scared space, and it's not an accident. Whatever comes into the space is there to teach you.

The way to reunite with bodhichitta is to lighten up in your practice and in your whole life. Meditation

You are offered the potential of opening up into the as-yet unknown, the much bigger world where there are smells you've never smelled, there are sights you've never seen, and there are sounds you've never heard. What you could experience is so much vaster than what you currently experience. Let's go in that direction. TS:

When we feel lonely, when we feel hopeless, what we want to do is to move to the right or the left. We don't want to sit and feel what we feel. We don't want to go through the detox. Yet the middle way encourages us to do just that. It encourages us to awaken the bravery that exists in everyone without exception, including you and me.

The idea isn't to try to get rid of your anger, but to make friends with it, to see it clearly with precision and honesty, and also to see it with gentleness.

The experience of labeling your thoughts "thinking" also, over time, becomes much more vivid.

Rather than letting our negativity get the better of us, we could acknowledge that right now we feel like a piece of shit and not be squeamish about taking a good look. That's the compassionate thing to do. That's the brave thing to do. We could smell that piece of shit. We could feel it; what is its texture, color, and shape?

the dharma itself supplies the tools and support we need to find our own beauty, our own insight, our own ability to work with neurosis and pain.

you are the sky. everything else - it's just the weather.

You say to yourself, "Thinking," and as you're saying that, basically what you are doing is letting go of those thoughts. You don't repress the thoughts. You acknowledge them as "thinking" very clearly and kindly, but then you let them go.

The problem isn't with the beliefs themselves but with how we use them to get ground under our feet, how we use them to feel right and to make someone else wrong

Cutting our expectations for a cure is a gift we can give ourselves.

There is, however, no need to be a prophet of doom or for us to go around living in constant dread. Our situation is definitely workable. By learning not to bite the hook now, with the little annoyances of an ordinary day, we'll be preparing ourselves to work with whatever lies ahead with compassion and wisdom.

So whether it's anger or craving or jealousy or fear or depression—whatever it might be—the notion is not to try to get rid of it, but to make friends with it. That means getting to know it completely, with some kind of softness, and learning how, once you've experienced it fully, to let go.

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. From the awakened point of view, that's life. Death is wanting to hold on to what you have and to have every experience confirm you and congratulate you and make you feel completely together.

Taking refuge is the way that we begin cultivating the openness and the goodheartedness that allow us to be less and less dependent.

If we can train ourselves through meditation to be more open and more accepting toward the wild arc of our experience ... we can become more settled and relaxed amid whatever life brings us.

The point is that you begin where you are, you see what a child you are, and you don't criticize that. You begin to explore, with a lot of humor and generosity toward yourself, all the places where you cling, and every time you cling, you realize, "Ah!