Quotes from Pema Chodron

We hold on to hope, and hope robs us of the present moment.

ACCORDING TO THE BUDDHA, the lives of all beings are marked by three characteristics: impermanence, egolessness, and suffering or dissatisfaction. Recognizing these qualities to be real and true in our own experience helps us to relax with things as they are.

An interesting practice that combines mindfulness and refraining is just to notice your physical movements when you feel uncomfortable.

Wisdom is a fluid process, not something concrete that can be added up or measured. The warrior-bodhisattva trains with the attitude that everything is a dream. Life is a dream; death is a dream; waking is a dream; sleeping is a dream. This dream is the direct immediacy of our experience. Trying to hold on to any of it by buying our story line only blocks our wisdom.

The third kind of loneliness is avoiding unnecesssary activities. When we're lonely in a "hot" way, we look for something to save us; we look for a way out. We get this queasy feeling that we call loneliness, and our minds just go wild trying to come up with companions to save us from despair. That's called unnecessary activity. It's a way of keeping ourselves busy so we don't have to feel any pain.

However, in this technique, because your eyes are open and because the gaze in not a tight gaze and because the whole emphasis of the practice is one of openess, even though you're mindful of the out-breath, you're not shutting out all other things that are going on.

As swans swim on the lake and vultures roam in the charnel ground, you can let your mind rest in its natural state.

The only way to do this is to open, be curious, and develop some sense of sympathy for everything that comes along, to get to know its nature and let it teach you what it will. It's going to stick around until you learn your lesson, at any rate.

Looking for alternatives is the only thing that keeps us from realizing that we're already in a sacred world. Looking for alternatives—better sights than we see, better sounds than we hear, a better mind than we have—keeps us from realizing that we could stand with pride in the middle of our life and realize it's a sacred mandala.

Everyday we could think about the aggression in the world. In New York, Los Angelos, Halifax, Taiwain, Beiruit, Kuwait, Somalia, Iraq. Everywhere. All over the world, everybody always strikes out at the enemy. And the pain escalates forever. Everyday we could reflect on this and ask ourselves, Am I going to add to the aggression in the world? Everyday, at the moment when things get edgy, we could just ask ourselves, Am I going to practice peace, or am I going to war?

But the instruction that the awareness is only twenty-five percent really brings home the idea that it's not a concentration practice - there's a very light touch on the berath as it goes out.

It's helpful to always remind yourself that meditation is about opening and relaxing withwhatever arises, without picking and choosing.

Cultivating absolute bodhichitta means having a relationship with the world that is nonconceptual, that is unprejudiced, having a direct, unedited relationship with reality.

A warrior accepts that we can never know what will happen to us next. We can try to control the uncontrollable by looking for security and predictability, always hoping to be comfortable and safe. But the truth is that we can never avoid uncertainty. This not-knowing is part of the adventure. It's also what makes us afraid.

We're able to see how we run and hide and keep ourselves busy so that we never have to let our hearts be penetrated.

Saying "thinking" is a very interesting point in the meditation. It's the point at which we can consciously train in gentleness and in developing a nonjudgmental attitude. The word for loving-kindness in Sanskrit is maitri. Maitri is also translated as unconditional friendliness. So each time you say to yourself "thinking," you are cultivating that unconditional friendliness toward whatever arises in your mind.

If we make the journey to get security, we're completely missing the point.

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.

Attention to the present moment. We make the choice, moment by moment, to be fully here. Attending to our present-moment mind and body is a way of being tender toward self, toward other, and toward the world. This quality of attention is inherent in our ability to love.

In cultivating loving-kindness, we learn first to be honest, loving, and compassionate toward ourselves.

In the early seventies, a friend kept saying to me, 'Whatever you do, don't try to make those feelings go away.' His advice went on: 'anything you can learn about working with your sense of discouragement or your sense of fear or your sense of bewilderment - anything you can do to work with those things - do it., please, because it will be such an inspiration to other people.

Space permeates everything, every moment of our lives.

So the next time you encounter fear, consider yourself lucky. This is where the courage comes in. Usually we think that brave people have no fear. The truth is that they are intimate with fear.

When we regard thoughts and emotions with humor and openness, that's how we perceive the universe.