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We can gradually drop our ideals of who we think we ought to be, or who we think we want to be, or who we think other people think we want to be or ought to be.

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
People
Gradually
Drop
Buddhism
Ideals
Ought
Suffering
Think
Thinking

More quotes by Pema Chodron

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All you need to know is that the future is wide open and you are about to create it by what you do.
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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.
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Anything we experience, no matter how challenging, can become an open pathway to awakening.
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The third noble truth says that the cessation of suffering is letting go of holding on to ourselves.
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Compassion for others begins with kindness to ourselves.
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Honesty without kindness, humor, and goodheartedness can be just mean. From the very beginning to the very end, pointing to our own hearts to discover what is true isn’t just a matter of honesty but also of compassion and respect for what we see.
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If we learn to open our hearts, anyone, including the people who drive us crazy, can be our teacher.
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Discomfort of any kind becomes the basis for practice. We breathe in knowing our pain is shared.
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When you begin to touch your heart or let your heart be touched, you begin to discover that it's bottomless.
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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.
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When we protect ourselves so we won't feel pain, that protection becomes like armor, like armor that imprisons the softness of of the heart.
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You must learn to sit with the restless, painful energy and not let the momentum pull you under and cause you to do the same thing over and over that's ruining your life and the lives of those around you.
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In truth, there is enormous space in which to live our everyday lives.
Pema Chodron
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We tend to forget that we are part of the natural scheme of things.
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 feel that we have to be right so that we can feel good... The whole right and wrong business closes us down and makes our world smaller.
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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How will we experience the world a month, a year, or five years from now? Will we be even angrier, more grasping and fearful, or will some shift have occurred? This depends entirely on the tendencies we reinforce today.
Pema Chodron
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To put it concisely, we suffer when we resist the noble and irrefutable truth of impermanence and death.
Pema Chodron
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The very first noble truth of the Buddha points out that suffering is inevitable for human beings as long as we believe that things last—that they don’t disintegrate, that they can be counted on to satisfy our hunger for security.
Pema Chodron