Quote

Generosity is an activity that loosens us up. By offering whatever we can - a dollar, a flower, a word of encouragement - we are training in letting go.

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
Generosity
Dollars
Flower
Training
Loosens
Activity
Dollar
Word
Offering
Whatever
Encouragement
Letting

More quotes by Pema Chodron

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The first noble truth of the Buddha is that when we feel suffering, it doesn’t mean that something is wrong. What a relief.
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Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible in us be found.
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The essence of bravery is being without self-deception.
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Whatever happens in your life, joyful or painful, do not be swept away by reactivity. Be patient with yourself and don't lose your sense of perspective.
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Tonglen is a way for you to be with people who need you - beginning with yourself.
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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.
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Searching for happiness prevents us from ever finding it.
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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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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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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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Someone needs to encourage us not to brush aside what we feel. Not to be ashamed of the love and grief that it arouses in us. Not to be afraid of pain. Someone needs to encourage us: that this soft spot in us could be awakened, and that to do this would change our lives.
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Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know. Even if we run a hundred miles an hour to the other side of the continent, we find the very same problem awaiting us when we arrive.
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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.
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Knowing pain is a very important ingredient of being there for another person.
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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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The second noble truth says that this resistance is the...mechanism of what we call ego, that resisting life causes suffering.
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This is the tendency of all living things: to avoid pain and to cling to pleasure.
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Treat yourself as your own beloved child.
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It's important to remember, when we're out there aggressively working for reform, that, even if our particular issue doesn't get resolved, we are adding peace to the world. We have to do our best and at the same time give up all hope of fruition.
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Enlightenment is a direct experience with reality.
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