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What you do for yourself, you're doing for others, and what you do for others, you're doing for yourself.

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
Others

More quotes by Pema Chodron

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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.
Pema Chodron
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We can put our whole heart into whatever we do but if we freeze our attitude into for or against, we're setting ourselves up for stress. Instead, we could just go forward with curiosity, wondering where this experiment will lead. This kind of open-ended inquisitiveness captures the spirit of enthusiasm, or heroic perseverance.
Pema Chodron
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Each moment is just what it is. It might be the only moment of our life it might be the only strawberry we'll ever eat. We could get depressed about it, or we could finally appreciate it and delight in the preciousness of every single moment of our life.
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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The future is the result of what we do right now.
Pema Chodron
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By becoming intimate with how we close down and how we open up, we awaken our unlimited potential.
Pema Chodron
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Enlightenment is a direct experience with reality.
Pema Chodron
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If you work with your mind, that will alleviate all the suffering that seems to come from the outside.
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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Few of us are satisfied with retreating from the world and just working on ourselves. We want our training to manifest and to be of benefit. The bodhisattva-warrior, therefore, makes a vow to wake up not just for himself but for the welfare of all beings.
Pema Chodron
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Peace isn’t an experience free of challenges, free of rough and smooth, it’s an experience that’s expansive enough to include all that arises without feeling threatened.
Pema Chodron
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The Process of becoming unstuck requires tremendous bravery, because basically we are completely changing our way of perceiving reality.
Pema Chodron
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Resistance to unwanted circumstances has the power to keep those circumstances alive and well for a very long time.
Pema Chodron
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If it's painful, you become willing not just to endure it but also to let it awaken your heart and soften you. You learn to embrace it.
Pema Chodron
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Come back to square one, just the minimum bare bones. Relaxing with the present moment, relaxing with hopelessness, relaxing with death, not resisting the fact that things end, that things pass, that things have no lasting substance, that everything is changing all the time-that is the basic message.
Pema Chodron
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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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It's helpful to remind yourself that meditation is about opening and relaxing with whatever arises, without picking and choosing.
Pema Chodron
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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.
Pema Chodron
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The essence of practice is always the same: instead of falling prey to a chain reaction of revenge or self-hatred, we gradually learn to catch the emotional reaction and drop the story lines.
Pema Chodron
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Most spiritual experiences begin with suffering. They begin with groundlessness. They begin when the rug has been pulled out from under us.
Pema Chodron