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If there's any possibility for enlightenment, it's right now, not at some future time. Now is the time.

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
Right
Time
Enlightenment
Possibility
Future
Moments

More quotes by Pema Chodron

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If we learn to open our hearts, anyone, including the people who drive us crazy, can be our teacher.
Pema Chodron
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Unconditional good heart toward others is not even a possibility unless we attend to our own demons.
Pema Chodron
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Ordinarily we are swept away by habitual momentum and don't interrupt our patterns slightly. When we feel betrayed or disappointed, does it occur to us to practice?
Pema Chodron
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Ego is like a room of your own, a room with a view with the temperature and the smells and the music that you like. You want it your own way. You'd just like to have a little peace, you'd like to have a little happiness, you know, just gimme a break.
Pema Chodron
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Compassion practice is daring. It involves learning to relax and allowing ourselves to move gently toward what scares us.
Pema Chodron
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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.
Pema Chodron
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Are you experiencing restlessness? Stay! Are fear and loathing out of control? Stay! Aching knees and throbbing back? Stay! What's for lunch? Stay! I can't stand this another minute! Stay!
Pema Chodron
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Even if you don't feel appreciation, just look. Feel what you feel take an interest and be curious.
Pema Chodron
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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.
Pema Chodron
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The wisdom, the strength, the confidence - the awakened heart and mind are always accessible -- here, now, always.
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.
Pema Chodron
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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.
Pema Chodron
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What you do for yourself, any gesture of kindness, any gesture of gentleness, any gesture of honesty and clear seeing toward yourself, will affect how you experience your world. In fact, it will transform how you experience the world. What you do for yourself, you’re doing for others, and what you do for others, you’re doing for yourself.
Pema Chodron
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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.
Pema Chodron
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You build inner strength through embracing the totality of your experience, both the delightful parts and the difficult parts.
Pema Chodron
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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
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The painful thing is that when we buy into disapproval,we are practicing disapproval. When we buy into harshness,we are practicing harshness.
Pema Chodron
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This moving away from comfort and security, this stepping out into what is unknown, uncharted and shaky - that's called liberation.
Pema Chodron
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We sow the seeds of our future hells or happiness by the way we open or close our minds right now.
Pema Chodron
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The essence of generosity is letting go. Pain is always a sign that we are holding on to something - usually ourselves.
Pema Chodron