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Use your life to wake you up.

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
Life
Wake
Positive
Use

More quotes by Pema Chodron

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The biggest obstacle to taking a bigger perspective on life is that our emotions capture and blind us.
Pema Chodron
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If you aren't feeding the fire of anger or the fire of craving by talking to yourself, then the fire doesn't have anything to feed on.
Pema Chodron
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Right down there in the thick of things, we discover the love that will not die.
Pema Chodron
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Suffering begins to dissolve when we can question the belief or the hope that there's anywhere to hide.
Pema Chodron
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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.
Pema Chodron
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We see how beautiful and wonderful and amazing things are, and we see how caught up we are. It isn’t that one is the bad part and one is the good part, but that it’s a kind of interesting, smelly, rich, fertile mess of stuff. When it’s all mixed up together, it’s us: humanness.
Pema Chodron
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The second noble truth says that this resistance is the...mechanism of what we call ego, that resisting life causes suffering.
Pema Chodron
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Impermanence is a principle of harmony. When we don't struggle against it, we are in harmony with reality.
Pema Chodron
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Tonglen practice begins to dissolve the illusion that each of us is alone with this personal suffering that no one else can understand.
Pema Chodron
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If you're invested in security and certainty, you are on the wrong planet.
Pema Chodron
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We practice to liberate ourselves from a burden.
Pema Chodron
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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.
Pema Chodron
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Feel the feelings and drop the story.
Pema Chodron
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Sticking with that uncertainty, getting the knack of relaxing in the midst of chaos, learning not to panic-this is the spiritual path.
Pema Chodron
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Use what seems like poison as medicine. Use your personal suffering as the path to compassion for all beings.
Pema Chodron
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It is only when we begin to relax with ourselves that meditation becomes a transformative process. Only when we relate with ourselves without moralizing, without harshness, without deception, can we let go of harmful patterns. Without maitri (metta), renunciation of old habits becomes abusive. This is an important point.
Pema Chodron
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In the most ordinary terms, egolessness is a flexible identity. It manifests as inquisitiveness , as adaptability, as humor, as playfulness. It is our capacity to relax with not knowing, not figuring everything out, with not being at all sure who we are, or who anyone else is, either.
Pema Chodron
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By not knowing, not hoping to know and not acting like we know what's happening, we begin to access our inner strength.
Pema Chodron
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We're afraid that this anger or sorrow or loneliness is going to last forever... Instead, acting it out is what makes it last.
Pema Chodron
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According to the Buddhist belief, you can go on and on indefinitely, so you see your life as just a brief moment in time.
Pema Chodron