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The only way to ease our pain is to experience it fully. Learn to stay with uneasiness, learn to stay with the tightening, so that the habitual chain reaction doesn't continue to rule your life.

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
Pain
Chains
Experience
Reactions
Doesn
Ease
Way
Fully
Tightening
Life
Rule
Uneasiness
Continue
Habitual
Stay
Chain
Learn
Reaction

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Whatever you are doing, take the attitude of wanting it directly or indirectly to benefit others. Take the attitude of wanting it to increase your experience of kinship with your fellow beings.
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It isn't the things that are happening to us that cause us to suffer, it's what we say to ourselves about the things that are happening. The truth you believe and cling to makes you unavailable to hear anything new.
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Knowing pain is a very important ingredient of being there for another person.
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We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don't really get solved. They come together and they fall apart.
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The real thing that we renounce is the tenacious hope that we could be saved from being who we are.
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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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This very moment is the perfect teacher, and, lucky for us, it's with us wherever we go.
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Meditation takes us just as we are, with our confusion and our sanity. This complete acceptance of ourselves as we are is called maitri, or unconditional friendliness, a simple, direct relationship with the way we are.
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Tonglen is a way for you to be with people who need you - beginning with yourself.
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Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know.
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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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Usually we think that brave people have no fear. The truth is that they are intimate with fear.
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We work on ourselves in order to help others, but also we help others in order to work on ourselves.
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Trying to change ourselves doesn't work in the long run because we're resisting our own energy. Self-improvemen t can have temporary results, but lasting transformation occurs only when we honor ourselves as the source of wisdom and compassion.
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The next step is to learn to communicate with the people that you feel are causing your pain and misery- not to learn how to prove them wrong and yourself right but how to communicate from the heart.
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Opening to the world begins to benefit ourselves and others simultaneously. The more we relate with others, the more quickly we discover where we're blocked.
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Never underestimate the desire to bolt.
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Gloriousness and wretchedness need each other. One inspires us, the other softens us.
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