Quotes About Resilience

PATIENCE is the antidote to anger, a way to learn to love and care for whatever we meet on the path.

Without loving-kindness, staying in pain is just warfare.

If you stay in bed all day with the covers over your head, if you overeat for the millionth time in your life, if you get drunk, if you get stoned, if it's just this habitual thing that you think is going to make you feel better, you know that's going to depress you and make you more discouraged.

I'd like to encourage us all to lighten up, to practice with a lot of gentleness. This is not the drill sergeant saying, "Lighten up or else." I have found that if we can possibly use anything we hear against ourselves, we usually do.

However, no matter what the size, color, or shape is, the point is still to lean toward the discomfort of life and see it clearly rather than to protect ourselves from it.

The everyday practice is simply to develop a complete acceptance and openness to all situations and emotions, and to all people, experiencing everything totally without mental reservations and blockages, so that one never withdraws or centralizes into oneself.

We would like to believe that when things are still and calm, that's the real stuff, and when things are messy, confused, and chaotic, we've done something wrong, or more usually someone else has done something to ruin our beautiful meditation. As someone once said about a loud, bossy woman, "What is that woman doing in my sacred world?

There is something aggressive about that approach to life, trying to flatten out all the rough spots and imperfections into a nice smooth ride.

Rejoicing in ordinary things is not sentimental or trite. It actually takes guts.

Each day, we're given many opportunities to open up or shut down. The most precious opportunity presents itself when we come to the place where we think we can't handle whatever is happening. It's too much. It's gone too far. We feel bad about ourselves. There's no way we can manipulate the situation to make ourselves come out looking good. No matter how hard we try, it just won't work. Basically, life has just nailed us.

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better." —Samuel Beckett

Death in everyday life could also be defined as experiencing all the things that we don't want. Our marriage isn't working; our job isn't coming together. Having a relationship with death in everyday life means that we begin to be able to wait, to relax with insecurity, with panic, with embarrassment, with things not working out.

Resistance to unwanted circumstances has the power to keep those circumstances alive and well for a very long time.

You come back to that breath over and over, through boredom, edginess, fear, and well-being. This perseverance and repetition—when done with honesty, a light touch, humor, and kindness—is its own reward.

the point is still to lean toward the discomfort of life and see it clearly rather than to protect ourselves from it.

Practicing loving-kindness toward ourselves seems as good a way as any to start illuminating the darkness of difficult times.

Cutting our expectations for a cure is a gift we can give ourselves. There is no cure for hot and cold. They will go on forever.

Protecting ourselves from pain—our own and that of others—has never worked. Everybody wants to be free from their suffering, but the majority of us go about it in ways that only make things worse.

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.

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

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.

May we all learn that pain is not the end of the journey, and neither is delight. We can hold them both—indeed hold it all—at the same time, remembering that everything in these quixotic, unpredictable, unsettled and unsettling, exhilarating and heart-stirring times is a doorway to awakening in sacred world.