Quotes from Pema Chodron

It isn't what happens to us that causes us to suffer; it's what we say to ourselves about what happens.

The more we witness our emotional reactions and understand how they work, the easier it is to refrain.

Life's work is to wake up, to let the things that enter your life wake you up rather than put you to sleep.

If you work with your mind, that will alleviate all the suffering that seems to come from the outside.

The approach is that the best way to use unwanted circumstances on the path of enlightenment is not to resist but to lean into them.

We feel that we have to be right so that we can feel good... The whole right and wrong business closes us down and makes our world smaller.

There isn't any hell or heaven except for how we relate to our world. Hell is just resistance to life.

give up believing that being able to escape our loneliness is going to bring any lasting happiness or joy or sense of well-being or courage or strength.

But when the tables are turned and we feel wretched, that softens us up. It ripens our hearts. It becomes the ground for understanding others.

THE SECOND MARK of existence is egolessness, sometimes called no-self. These words can be misleading. They don't mean that we disappear—or that we erase our personality. Egolessness means that the fixed idea that we have about ourselves as solid and separate from each other is painfully limiting. That we take ourselves so seriously, that we are so absurdly important in our own minds, is a problem. Self-importance is like a prison for

The spiritual journey involves going beyond hope and fear, stepping into unknown territory, continually moving forward. The most important aspect of being on the spiritual path may be to just keep moving.

More simply, regard everything as a dream. Life is a dream. Death is also a dream, for that matter; waking is a dream and sleeping is a dream. Another way to put this is, "Every situation is a passing memory.

We could say that the word mindfulness is pointing to being one with our experience, not dissociating, being right there when our hand touches the doorknob or the telephone rings or feelings of all kinds arise. The

When you open yourself to the continually changing, impermanent, dynamic nature of your own being and of reality, you increase your capacity to love and care about other people and your capacity to not be afraid.

getting the knack of relaxing in the midst of chaos, learning not to panic—this is the spiritual path.

In Buddha's opinion, to train in staying open and curious—to train in dissolving the barriers that we erect between ourselves and the world—is the best use of our human lives.

Although it is embarassing and painful, it is very healing to stop hiding from yourself. It is healing to know all the ways that you're sneaky, all the ways hat you hide out, all the ways that you shut down, deny, close off, criticize people, all your weird little ways.

We will be softened by the sheer force of whatever energy arises—the energy of anger, the energy of disappointment, the energy of fear. When it's not solidified in one direction or another, that very energy pierces us to the heart, and it opens us. This is the discovery of egolessness.

The underlying addiction is to this dream of lasting pleasure and comfort.

But the advice we usually get is to sweeten it up, smooth it over, take a pill, or distract ourselves, but by all means make it go away. We don't need that kind of encouragement, because dissociating from fear is what we do naturally. We habitually spin off and freak out when there's even the merest hint of fear. We feel it coming and we check out.

None of what we've learned seems very relevant when our lover leaves us, when our child has a tantrum in the supermarket, when we're insulted by our colleague.

Tonglen (sending-and-taking) practice also helps cultivate fearlessness. When you do this practice for some time, you begin to realize that fear has to do with wanting to protect your heart: you feel that something is going to harm your heart, and therefore you protect it.

The first noble truth of the Buddha is that when we feel suffering, it doesn't mean that something is wrong. What a relief. Finally somebody told the truth. Suffering is part of life, and we don't have to feel it's happening because we personally made the wrong move. In reality, however, when we feel suffering, we think that something is wrong. As long

WE ALREADY HAVE everything we need. There is no need for self-improvement. All these trips that we lay on ourselves—the heavy-duty fearing that we're bad and hoping that we're good, the identities that we so dearly cling to, the rage, the jealousy and the addictions of all kinds—never touch our basic wealth.