Quotes About Acceptance

What awakens my heart, and what blocks that process from happening?

Happiness "disappears in a moment," he says, "like a dewdrop on a blade of grass."* Basing your comfort on things that don't last is a futile strategy for living.

To be fearless isn't really to overcome fear, it's to come to know its nature.

feel gratitude that someone saw the truth and pointed out that we don't suffer this kind of pain because of our personal inability to get things right.

But we don't have to close down when we feel groundlessness in any form. Instead, we can turn toward it and say, "This is what freedom from fixed mind feels like. This is what freedom from closed-heartedness feels like. This is what unbiased, unfettered goodness feels like. Maybe I'll get curious and see if I can go beyond my resistance and experience the goodness." Buddhism holds

If you acknowledge what's happening and refrain from acting, that opens up some space in your mind. Clinging to views and opinions, thinking you're always right and lording it over others, keeps you endlessly stuck.

Good or bad, happy or sad, all thoughts vanish into emptiness like the imprint of a bird in the sky.

Chaos is part of our home ground. Instead of looking for something higher or purer, work with it just as it is.

When we don't act out and we don't repress, our passion, our aggression, and our ignorance become our wealth. We don't have to transform anything. Simply letting go of the story line is what it takes, which is not all that easy.

We can lead our life so as to become more awake to who we are and what we're doing rather than trying to improve or change or get rid of who we are or what we're doing.

In sitting meditation, we train in mindfulness and unconditional friendliness: in being steadfast with our bodies, our emotions, our thoughts.

To think that we can finally get it all together is unrealistic.

One popular way of relating to physical pain is mindfulness meditation. It involves directing your full attention to the pain and breathing in and out of the spot that hurts. Instead of trying to avoid the discomfort, you open yourself completely to it. You become receptive to the painful sensation without dwelling on the story your mind has concocted: It's bad; I shouldn't feel this way; maybe it will never go away.

It points out how we continually try to avoid the uncertainty inherent in our condition, how we continually try to get solid ground under our feet. The eight worldly concerns are presented as four pairs of opposites: pleasure and pain, gain and loss, fame and disgrace, praise and blame.

If we're willing to give up hope that insecurity and pain can be exterminated, then we can have the courage to relax with the groundlessness of our situation. This is the first step on the path.

The most heartbreaking thing of all is how we cheat ourselves of the present moment.

We're not trying to be something we aren't; rather, we're rediscovering, reconnecting with who we are.

We think we'd be delighted to have an unconditional relationship, but that's only as long as it's on our own terms.

Each day, we're given many opportunities to open up or shut down. Most of us do not take these situations as teachings. We automatically hate them. We run like crazy. We use all kinds of ways to escape—all addictions stem from this moment when we meet our edge and we just can't stand it. We feel we have to soften it, pad it with something, and we become addicted to whatever it is that seems to ease the pain.

We don't experience the world fully unless we are willing to give everything away.

Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don't really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again.

Not getting what you want. Getting what you do not want. This is the root of all suffering. ~ Pema Chodron

When we hear about compassion, it naturally brings up working with others, caring for others. The reason we're often not there for others - whether for our child or our mother or someone who is insulting us or someone who frightens us - is that we're not there for ourselves. There are whole parts of ourselves that are so unwanted that whenever they begin to come up we run away.

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.