Pema Chödrön
Quotes
The trick is to keep exploring and not bail out, even when we find out that something is not what we thought... Nothing is what we thought.
Generally speaking, we regard discomfort in any form as bad news. But for practitioners or spiritual warriors — people who have a certain hunger to know what is true — feelings like disappointment, embarrassment, irritation, resentment, anger, jealousy, and fear, instead of being bad news, are actually very clear moments that... teach us to perk up and lean in when we feel we’d rather collapse and back away.
Life is a good teacher and a good friend. Things are always in transition, if we could only realize it.
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?”
We all need to be reminded and encouraged to relax with whatever arises and bring whatever we encounter to the path.
Emptiness is not what we thought. Neither is mindfulness or fear. Compassion—not what we thought. Love. Buddha nature. Courage.
This very moment is the perfect teacher, and, lucky for us, it’s with us wherever we are.
Fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to the truth.
Meditation is an invitation to notice when we reach our limit and to not get carried away by hope and fear.
Thinking that we can find some lasting pleasure and avoid pain is what in Buddhism is called samsara, a hopeless cycle that goes round and round endlessly and causes us to suffer greatly.
In fact, anyone who stands on the edge of the unknown, fully in the present without reference point, experiences groundlessness.
When things fall apart and we’re on the verge of we know not what, the test of each of us is to stay on that brink and not concretize.
