“Fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to the truth.” ― Pema Chodron
“Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know.” ― Pema Chodron
“Let difficulty transform you. And it will. In my experience, we just need help in learning how not to run away.” ― Pema Chodron
“Like all explorers, we are drawn to discover what’s out there without knowing yet if we have the courage to face it.” ― Pema Chödrön
“Look ahead to the rest of your life and ask yourself what you want it to add up to.” ― Pema Chodron
“Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It’s a relationship between equals. Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others.” ― Pema Chodron
“Things are as bad and as good as they seem. There’s no need to add anything extra.” ― Pema Chödrön
“When you open yourself to the continually changing, impermanent, dynamic nature of your own being and of reality, you increase your capacity to love and care about other people and your capacity to not be afraid.” ― Pema Chödrön
“We have a choice. We can spend our whole life suffering because we can’t relax with how things really are, or we can relax and embrace the open-endedness of the human situation, which is fresh, unfixated, unbiased.” ― Pema Chodron
“The most difficult times for many of us are the ones we give ourselves.” ― Pema Chödrön
“You must face annihilation over and over again to find what is indestructible in yourself.” ― Pema Chodron
“Being open and receptive to whatever is happening is always more important than getting worked up and adding further aggression to the planet, adding further pollution to the atmosphere.” ― Pema Chodron
“Rather than letting our negativity get the better of us, we could acknowledge that right now we feel like a piece of shit and not squeamish about taking a good look.” ― Pema Chodron
“If we learn to open our hearts, anyone, including the people who drive us crazy, can be our teacher.” ― Pema Chodron
“Trying to run away is never the answer to being fully human.” ― Pema Chödrön
“Just where you are – that’s the place to start.” ― Pema Chodron
“When we protect ourselves so we won’t feel pain, that protection becomes armor, like armor that imprisons the softness of the heart.” ― Pema Chodron
“Running away from the immediacy of our experience is like preferring death to life.” ― Pema Chödrön
“Resistance to unwanted circumstances has the power to keep those circumstances alive and well for a very long time.” ― Pema Chodron
“Learning not to panic – this is the spiritual path.” ― Pema Chodron
“Inner peace begins the moment you choose not to allow another person or event to control your emotions.” ― Pema Chodron
“Rather than being disheartened by the uncertainty of life, what if we accepted it and relaxed into it? What if we said, yes, this is the way it is; this is what it means to be human, and decided to sit down and enjoy the ride.” ― Pema Chodron
“Rejoicing in ordinary things is not sentimental or trite. It actually takes guts. Each time we drop our complaints and allow everyday good fortune to inspire us, we enter the warrior’s world.” ― Pema Chodron
“Without giving up hope—that there’s somewhere better to be, that there’s someone better to be—we will never relax with where we are or who we are.” ― Pema Chodron
“The idea of karma is that you continually get the teachings that you need to open your heart.” ― Pema Chodron
“Sometimes when things fall apart, well, that’s the big opportunity to change.” ― Pema Chodron
“We don’t set out to save the world; we set out to wonder how other people are doing and to reflect on how our actions affect other people’s hearts.” ― Pema Chodron
“It isn’t the things that happen to us in our lives that cause us to suffer, it’s how we relate to the things that happen to us that causes us to suffer.” ― Pema Chodron
“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.” ― Pema Chodron
“If someone comes along and shoots an arrow into your heart, it’s fruitless to stand there and yell at the person. It would be much better to turn your attention to the fact that there’s an arrow in your heart.” ― Pema Chodron
“Nothing ever goes away until it teaches us what we need to know.” ― Pema Chodron
“None of us is ever OK, but we all get through everything just fine.” ― Pema Chodron
“As long as our orientation is toward perfection or success, we will never learn about unconditional friendship with ourselves, nor will we find compassion.”
“Life is like that. We don’t know anything. We call something bad; we call it good. But really we just don’t know.” ― Pema Chödrön
“You are the sky. Everything else – it’s just the weather.” ― Pema Chodron
“The future is completely open, and we are writing it moment to moment.” ― Pema Chodron
“If you are invested in security and certainty, you are on the wrong planet.” ― Pema Chodron
“Most of us do not take these [difficult] 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.” ― Pema Chodron
“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.” ― Pema Chodron
“Precision, gentleness and the ability to let go are not something that we have to gain, but something that we could bring out, cultivate, rediscover in ourselves.” ― Pema Chodron
“…we cannot be in the present moment and run our story lines at the same time!”
“Each moment is just what it is. It might be the only moment of our life; it might be the only strawberry we’ll ever eat. We could get depressed about it, or we could finally appreciate it and delight in the preciousness of every single moment of our life.” ― Pema Chodron
