Quote

I have all the support I need to simply relax and be with the transitional, in-process quality of my life. I have all I need to engage in the process of awakening.

Pema Chodron

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Pema Chodron
Age: 88
Born: 1936
Born: July 14
Clergyman
Philosopher
Writer
New York City
New York
Deirdre Blomfield-Brow
Relax
Simply
Support
Quality
Process
Need
Transitional
Needs
Engage
Life
Awakening

More quotes by Pema Chodron

Image
Softening what is rigid in our hearts.
Pema Chodron
Image
It's hard to know whether to laugh or to cry at the human predicament. Here we are with so much wisdom and tenderness, and—without even knowing it—we cover it over to protect ourselves from insecurity. Although we have the potential to experience the freedom of a butterfly, we mysteriously prefer the small and fearful cocoon of ego.
Pema Chodron
Image
It isn't the things that happen to us in our lives that cause us to suffer, it's how we relate to the things that happen to us that causes us to suffer.
Pema Chodron
Image
It's a transformative experience to simply pause instead of immediately fill up the space. By waiting, we begin to connect with fundamental restlessness as well as fundamental spaciousness. -Pema Chodron, from When Things Fall Apart
Pema Chodron
Image
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.
Pema Chodron
Image
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
Image
The central question of a warrior's training is not how we avoid uncertainty and fear but how we relate to discomfort.
Pema Chodron
Image
We sow the seeds of our future hells or happiness by the way we open or close our minds right now.
Pema Chodron
Image
We don’t sit in meditation to become good meditators. We sit in meditation so that we’ll be more awake in our lives.
Pema Chodron
Image
So many of us start along the spiritual path because we are suffering. But you must realize that for real healing to occur, there must first be deep compassion for yourself, especially the parts of yourself you dislike or consider ugly.
Pema Chodron
Image
Let difficulty transform you. And it will. In my experience, we just need help in learning how not to run away.
Pema Chodron
Image
Use what seems like poison as medicine. Use your personal suffering as the path to compassion for all beings.
Pema Chodron
Image
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
Image
Suffering begins to dissolve when we can question the belief or the hope that there's anywhere to hide.
Pema Chodron
Image
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.
Pema Chodron
Image
This very moment is the perfect teacher, and, lucky for us, it's with us wherever we go.
Pema Chodron
Image
Don’t get caught up in hopes of what you’ll achieve and how good your situation will be some day in the future. What you do right now is what matters.
Pema Chodron
Image
The idea is to develop sympathy for your own confusion.
Pema Chodron
Image
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.
Pema Chodron
Image
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