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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.

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
Helping
Come
Important
World
Welfare
People
Compassion
Realize
Realizing
Help

More quotes by Pema Chodron

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We can drop the fundamental hope that there is a better me who one day will emerge. We can't just jump over ourselves as if we were not there.
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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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The biggest obstacle to taking a bigger perspective on life is that our emotions capture and blind us.
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Our neurosis and our wisdom are made out of the same material. If you throw out your neurosis, you also throw out your wisdom.
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When we scratch the wound and give into our addictions we do not allow the wound to heal.
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Our patterns are well established, seductive, and comforting. Just wanting for them to be ventilated isn't enough. Those of us who struggle with this know.
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Suffering begins to dissolve when we can question the belief or the hope that there's anywhere to hide.
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Use your life to wake you up.
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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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The future is the result of what we do right now.
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If you see a homeless person on the street, and they need food, housing, medical attention - if you can give that, do it. But at the same time, work with tonglen, because that is how you start dissolving the barrier between you and them.
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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.
Pema Chodron
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We can put our whole heart into whatever we do but if we freeze our attitude into for or against, we're setting ourselves up for stress. Instead, we could just go forward with curiosity, wondering where this experiment will lead. This kind of open-ended inquisitiveness captures the spirit of enthusiasm, or heroic perseverance.
Pema Chodron
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As for our inner level of obstacle, perhaps the only enemy we have is that we don't like the way reality is now and therefore wish it would go away fast. But what we need to acknowledge is that nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know.
Pema Chodron
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Buddhism itself is all about empowering yourself, not about getting what you want.
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.
Pema Chodron
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A heartfelt sense of aspiring cuts through negativity about yourself it cuts through the heavy trips you lay on yourself.
Pema Chodron
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If you work with your mind, instead of trying to change everything on the outside, that's how your temper will cool down.
Pema Chodron
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If we begin to get in touch with whatever we feel with some kind of kindness, our protective shells will melt, and we'll find that more areas of our lives are workable. AS we learn to have compassion for ourselves, the circle of compassion for others-what and whom we can work with, and how-becomes wider.
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Things are as bad and as good as they seem. There's no need to add anything extra.
Pema Chodron