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Pema Chödrön Quotes

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Famous Pema Chödrön Quotes

“Whether it’s ourselves, our lovers, bosses, children, local Scrooge, or the political situation, it’s more daring and real not to shut anyone out of our hearts and not to make the other into an enemy. If we begin to live like this, we’ll find that we actually can’t make things completely right or completely wrong anymore, because things are a lot more slippery and playful than that. Everything is ambiguous; everything is always shifting and changing, and there are as many different takes on any given situation as there are people involved. Trying to find absolute rights and wrongs is a trick we play on ourselves to feel secure and comfortable.”

LifeChangeLivingOpennessAmbiguity
Book:When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times
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“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.”

LifeChangeAcceptanceLivingAwakeningBuddhist Teachings
Book:When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times
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“I used to think about Alice in Wonderland, how she just fell down that hole and she was falling and falling and she was just not grabbing for anything or anything like that. And at one point in my life, she was like a role model to me because of the fact that she—she just fell and waited to see where she was going to land, you know. So for all of us I think we—we shy away from these feelings. And in the process of that, our ability to hold them, our ability to live from that place, diminishes. And the way to become more comfortable, more at ease, in a shifting, changing world—which has always been the case actually—is to make friends with the feelings that are evoked by nothing to hold on to.”

ChangeComfortLetting GoReleaseAmbiguityAlice In WonderlandNonattachmentComfort With AmbiguityComfort With Change
Author:Pema Chödrön
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“This is where renunciation enters the picture--renunciation of the hope that our experience could be different, renunciation of the hope that we could be better. The Buddhist monastic rules that advise renouncing liquor, renouncing sex, and so on are not pointing out that those things are inherently bad or immoral, but that we use them as babysitters. We use them as a way to escape; we use them to try to get comfort and to distract ourselves. The real thing that we renounce is the tenacious hope that we could be saved from being who we are. Renunciation is a teaching to inspire us to investigate what's happening every time we grab something because we can't stand to face what's coming.”

HopeChangeAcceptanceBuddhismEscapeRenunciationBuddhist Teachings
Book:When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times
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“When we’re putting up the barriers and the sense of “me” as separate from “you” gets stronger, right there in the midst of difficulty and pain, the whole thing could turn around simply by not erecting barriers; simply by staying open to the difficulty, to the feelings that you’re going through; simply by not talking to ourselves about what’s happening. That is a revolutionary step. Becoming intimate with pain is the key to changing at the core of our being—staying open to everything we experience, letting the sharpness of difficult times pierce us to the heart, letting these times open us, humble us, and make us wiser and more brave. Let difficulty transform you. And it will. In my experience, we just need help in learning how not to run away.”

WisdomPainGrowthChangeHumilityCommunicationBuddhismMindfulnessBraverySelf Compassion
Book:Practicing Peace in Times of War
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