Quotes from Pema Chodron

When the appearances of this life dissolve, May I, with ease and great happiness, Let go of all attachments to this life As a son or daughter returning home.

We don't experience the world fully unless we are willing to give everything away. Samaya means not holding anything back, not preparing our escape route, not looking for alternatives, not thinking that there is ample time to do things later.

We can learn to meet whatever arises with curiosity and not make it such a big deal.

We acknowledge our aversions and our cravings. We become familiar with the strategies and beliefs we use to fortify our cocoon.

Los pensamientos, emociones, estados de ánimo y recuerdos vienen y van, y el ahora básico está siempre

People have no respect for impermanence. We take no delight in it; in fact, we despair of it. We regard it as pain. We try to resist it by making things that will last—forever, we say—things that we don't have to wash, things that we don't have to iron. Somehow, in the process of trying to deny that things are always changing, we lose our sense of the sacredness of life. We tend to forget that we are part of the natural scheme of things.

Rikpa literally means "intelligence" or "brightness." Behind all the planning and worrying, behind all the wishing and wanting, picking and choosing, the unfabricated, wisdom mind of rikpa is always here. Whenever we stop talking to ourselves, rikpa is continually here.

Embarking on a spiritual journey is like getting into a very small boat and setting out on the ocean to search for unknown lands. With whole hearted practice comes inspiration, but sooner or later we will also encounter fear. For all we know, when we get to the horizon, we are going to drop off the edge of the world. Like all explorers, we are drawn to discover what's waiting out there without knowing yet if we have the courage to face it.

Life is a good teacher and a good friend. Things are always in transition, if we could only realize it. Nothing ever sums itself up in the way that we like to dream about. The offcenter, in-between state is an ideal situation, a situation in which we don't get caught and we can open our hearts and minds beyond limit. It's a very tender, nonaggressive, openended state of affairs

No lasting happiness comes from being caught in this cycle of attraction and aversion. We can never get life to work out so that we eliminate everything we fear and end up with all the goodies. Therefore the warrior-bodhisattva cultivates equanimity, the vast mind that doesn't narrow reality into for and against, liking and disliking.

Our personal demons come in many guises. We experience them as shame, as jealousy, as abandonment, as rage. They are anything that makes us so uncomfortable that we continually run away.

But in this meditation technique, we are with the out-breath; there's no particular instruction about what to do until the next out-breath.

Ego could be defined as whatever covers up basic goodness. From an experiential point of view, what is ego covering up? It's covering up our experience of just being here, just fully being where we are, so that we can relate with the immediacy of our experience. Egolessness is a state of mind that has complete confidence in the sacredness of the world. It is unconditional well-being, unconditional joy that includes all the different qualities of our experience.

Yesterday I talked about cultivating precision, gentleness, and openess, and described how the meditation technique helps us to remember the qualities that we already possess.

The basic creative energy of life - life force - bubbles up and courses through all of existence

Every time your stream of thoughts solidifies into a heavy story line that seems to be taking you elsewhere, label that "thinking." Then you will be able to see how all the passion that's connected with these thoughts, or all the aggression or all the heartbreak, is simply passing memory. If even for a second you actually had a full experience that it was all just thought, that would be a moment of full awakening.

Every day we could think about the aggression in the world, in New York, Los Angeles, Halifax, Taiwan, Beirut, Kuwait, Somalia, Iraq, everywhere. All over the world, everybody always strikes out at the enemy, and the pain escalates forever. Every day we could reflect on this and ask ourselves, "Am I going to add to the aggression in the world?" Every day, at the moment when things get edgy, we can just ask ourselves, "Am I going to practice peace, or am I going to war?

The instruction is to relate compassionately with where we find ourselves and to begin to see our predicament as workable.

Nobody else can really begin to sort out for you what do you accept and what to reject in terms of what wakes you up and what makes you fall asleep. No one else can really sort out for you what do you accept - what opens up your world – and what to reject – but seems to keep you going round and round in some kind of repetitive misery.

Expansion never happens through greediness or pushing or striving. It happens through some combination of learning to relax where you already are and, at the same time, keeping the possibility open that your capacity, my capacity, the capacity of all beings, is limitless. As we continue to relax where we are, our opening expands.

None of us is okay and all of us are fine. It's not just one way. We are walking, talking paradoxes.

Impermanence means that the essence of life is fleeting.

Awakeness is found in our pleasure and our pain, our confusion and our wisdom. It's available in each moment of our weird, unfathomable, ordinary everyday lives.

Estaba demasiado ocupada para ver el sol.» Ella se rió y me dijo: «¡Demasiado ocupada para vivir la vida!»