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You must learn to sit with the restless, painful energy and not let the momentum pull you under and cause you to do the same thing over and over that's ruining your life and the lives of those around you.

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
Causes
Learn
Ruining
Lives
Momentum
Energy
Restless
Around
Pull
Painful
Must
Cause
Thing
Learning
Life

More quotes by Pema Chodron

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Honesty without kindness, humor, and goodheartedness can be just mean.
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Ego is something that you come to know - something that you befriend by not acting out or by repressing all the feelings that you feel.
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Compassion becomes real when we recognize our shared humanity.
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Our true nature is like a precious jewel: although it may be temporarily buried in mud, it remains completely brilliant and unaffected. We simply have to uncover it.
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Awareness is the key. Do we see the stories that we're telling ourselves and question their validity?
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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.
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At some point, we realize that what we do for ourselves benefits others, and what we do for others benefits us.
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So even if the hot loneliness is there, and for 1.6 seconds we sit with that restlessness when yesterday we couldn't sit for even one, that's the journey of the warrior. (68)
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Everything in our lives has the potential to wake us up or put us to sleep. Allowing it to awaken us is up to us.
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But all the time our warmth and brilliance are right here. This is who we really are. We are one blink of an eye away from being fully awake.
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To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest.
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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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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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We hold on to hope, and hope robs us of the present moment.
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Hope and fear come from feeling that we lack something they come from a sense of poverty. We can’t simply relax with ourselves. We hold on to hope, and hope robs us of the present moment. We feel that someone else knows what is going on, but that there is something missing in us, and therefore something is lacking in our world.
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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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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.
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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Compassionate action starts with seeing yourself when you start to make yourself right and when you start to make yourself wrong. At that point you could just contemplate the fact that there is a larger alternative to either of those, a more tender, shaky kind of place where you could live.
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When we are willing to stay even a moment with uncomfortable energy, we gradually learn not to fear it.
Pema Chodron