Quote

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

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Pema Chodron
Age: 88
Born: 1936
Born: July 14
Clergyman
Philosopher
Writer
New York City
New York
Deirdre Blomfield-Brow
Better
Attention
Yell
Heart
Turns
Arrow
Much
Fact
Arrows
Would
Comes
Mindfulness
Facts
Buddhist
Someone
Along
Persons
Turn
Fruitless
Person
Stand
Shoots

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Sitting meditation gives us a way to move closer to our thoughts and emotions and to get in touch with our bodies.
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Meditation is not about getting out of ourselves or achieving something better. It is about getting in touch with what you already are.
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We are undoing a pattern... It's the human pattern: we project onto the world a zillion possibilities of attaining resolution.
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You see, there really is no separation between you and everyone else.
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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.
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The best spiritual instruction is when you wake up in the morning and say, 'I wonder what's going to happen today.' And then carry that kind of curiosity through your life.
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The Buddha taught that we're not actually in control, which is a pretty scary idea. But when you let things be as they are, you will be a much happier, more balanced, compassionate person.
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Ordinarily we are swept away by habitual momentum and don't interrupt our patterns slightly. When we feel betrayed or disappointed, does it occur to us to practice?
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It's hard to know whether to laugh or to cry at the human predicament. Here we are with so much wisdom and tenderness, and—without even knowing it—we cover it over to protect ourselves from insecurity. Although we have the potential to experience the freedom of a butterfly, we mysteriously prefer the small and fearful cocoon of ego.
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Whatever is happening is the path to enlightenment.
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When we resist change, it’s called suffering. But when we can completely let go and not struggle against it, when we can embrace the groundlessness of our situation and relax into it’s dynamic quality, that’s called enlightenment
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Use what seems like poison as medicine. Use your personal suffering as the path to compassion for all beings.
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If we begin to get in touch with whatever we feel with some kind of kindness, our protective shells will melt, and we'll find that more areas of our lives are workable. AS we learn to have compassion for ourselves, the circle of compassion for others-what and whom we can work with, and how-becomes wider.
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Compassion for others begins with kindness to ourselves.
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Tonglen is a way for you to be with people who need you - beginning with yourself.
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Each of us has a soft spot: the place in our experience where we feel vulnerable and tender. This soft spot is inherent in appreciation and love, and it is equally inherent in pain.
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In order to have compassion for others, we have to have compassion for ourselves.
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Somehow, in the process of trying to deny that things are always changing, we lose our sense of the sacredness of life. We tend to forget that we are part of the natural scheme of things.
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We have two alternatives: either we question our beliefs - or we don't. Either we accept our fixed versions of reality- or we begin to challenge them. In Buddha's opinion, to train in staying open and curious - to train in dissolving our assumptions and beliefs - is the best use of our human lives.
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So war and peace start in the human heart. Whether that heart is open or whether that heart closes has global implications.
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