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There is no cultivation of patience when your pattern is to just try to seek harmony and smooth everything out. Patience implies willingness to be alive rather than trying to seek harmony.

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
Harmony
Seek
Cultivation
Alive
Implies
Rather
Pattern
Everything
Smooth
Trying
Willingness
Patience
Patterns

More quotes by Pema Chodron

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Welcome the present moment as if you had invited it. It is all we ever have, so we night as well work with it rather than struggling against it. We might as well make it our friend and teacher rather than our enemy.
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Until we stop clinging to the concept of good and evil, the world will continue to manifest as friendly goddesses and harmful demons.
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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.
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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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We hold on to hope, and hope robs us of the present moment.
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People get into a heavy-duty sin and guilt trip, feeling that if things are going wrong, that means that they did something bad and they are being punished. That's not the idea at all.
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Rejoicing in ordinary things is not sentimental or trite. It actually takes guts. Each time we drop our complaints and allow everyday good fortune to inspire us, we enter the warrior's world.
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When you have made good friends with yourself, your situation will be more friendly too.
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It is possible to move through the drama of our lives without believing so earnestly in the character that we play.
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We don’t sit in meditation to become good meditators. We sit in meditation so that we’ll be more awake in our lives.
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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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we come to realize that other people's welfare is just as important as our own. In helping them, we help ourselves. In helping ourselves, we help the world.
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Honesty without kindness, humor, and goodheartedness can be just mean.
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Each of us has a soft spot: the place in our experience where we feel vulnerable and tender. This soft spot is inherent in appreciation and love, and it is equally inherent in pain.
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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.
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Rather than becoming more relaxed, you start pulling down the shades and locking the door. When you do go out, you find the experience more and more unsettling and disagreeable. You become touchier, more fearful, more irritable than ever. The more you try to get it your way, the less you feel at home.
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When we touch the center of sorrow, when we sit with discomfort without trying to fix it, when we stay present to the pain of disapproval or betrayal and let it soften us, these are times that we connect with bohdichitta.
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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.
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There are many changes in the weather of a day.
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Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know.
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