Quotes About Transformation

Interrupting our destructive habits and awakening our heart is the work of a lifetime.

Transformation occurs only when we remember, breath by breath, year after year, to move toward our emotional distress without condemning or justifying our experience.

What you do for yourself, any gesture of kindness, any gesture of gentleness, any gesture of honesty and clear seeing toward yourself, will affect how you experience your world. In fact, it will transform how you experience the world. What you do for yourself, you're doing for others, and what you do for others, you're doing for yourself.

TURNING YOUR MIND toward the dharma does not bring security or confirmation. Turning your mind toward the dharma does not bring any ground to stand on. In fact, when your mind turns toward the dharma, you fearlessly acknowledge impermanence and change and begin to get the knack of hopelessness.

Awakening is not a process of building ourselves up but a process of letting go. It's a process of relaxing in the middle—the paradoxical, ambiguous middle, full of potential, full of new ways of thinking and seeing—with absolutely no money-back guarantee of what will happen next.

And that can never be a mistake--to fly instead of staying in the nest with all the poop and everything that's in there.

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.

Like a treasure found at home, enriching me without fatigue, you, my dear troublemaker, are the means by which a confused person like me will attain enlightenment.

It's a continual process of opening and surrender, like taking off layer after layer of clothes

there's no end to the number of fresh starts you get. There's no fixed "you" doomed to stay in the same rut forever.

The opposite of samsara is when the walls fall down, the cocoon completely disappears, and we are totally open to whatever may happen, with no withdrawing, no centralizing into ourselves. That is what we aspire to, the warrior's journey. That's what stirs us and inspires us: leaping, being thrown out of the nest, going through initiation rites, growing up, stepping into something that's uncertain and unknown.

May bodhichitta, precious and sublime, Arise where it has not yet come to be; And where it has arisen, may it never fail, But grow and flourish ever more and more.

It starts with catching ourselves when we spin off in the same old ways. Usually we feel that there's a large problem and we have to fix it. The instruction is to stop. Do something unfamiliar. Do anything besides rushing off in the same old direction, up to the same old tricks.

We commit to doing all it takes to free ourselves completely from all our varieties of confusion and unconscious habit and suffering, because these prevent us from being fully there for others. In the language of Buddhism, our ultimate commitment is to attain "enlightenment." In essence, this means knowing fully who we really are.

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. To live is to be willing to die over and over again. From the awakened point of view, that's life. Death is wanting to hold on to what you have and to have every experience confirm you and congratulate you and make you feel completely together.

What we're talking about is getting to know fear, becoming familiar with fear, looking it right in the eye—not as a way to solve problems, but as a complete undoing of old ways of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and thinking.

Everything that occurs is not only usable and workable but is actually the path itself. We can use everything that happens to us as the means for waking up. We can use everything that occurs—whether it's our conflicting emotions and thoughts or our seemingly outer situation—to show us where we are asleep and how we can wake up completely, utterly, without reservations.

Don't make gods into demons.

Só encontraremos aquilo que é indestrutível em nós à medida que nos expusermos cada vez mais à destruição

That which is threatening to ego is liberating to the heart.

Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing.

A fresh attitude starts to happen when we look to see that yesterday was yesterday, and now it is gone; today is today and now it is new. It is like that—every hour, every minute is changing. If we stop observing change, then we stop seeing everything as new. —DZIGAR KONGTRUL RINPOCHE T