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In a nutshell, when life is pleasant, think of others. When life is a burden, think of others.

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
Nutshell
Pleasant
Burden
Others
Think
Thinking
Life

More quotes by Pema Chodron

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Whatever you are doing, take the attitude of wanting it directly or indirectly to benefit others. Take the attitude of wanting it to increase your experience of kinship with your fellow beings.
Pema Chodron
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When we resist change, it’s called suffering. But when we can completely let go and not struggle against it, when we can embrace the groundlessness of our situation and relax into it’s dynamic quality, that’s called enlightenment
Pema Chodron
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Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know.
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
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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.
Pema Chodron
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The future is the result of what we do right now.
Pema Chodron
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The most important aspect of being on a spiritual path may be to just keep moving.
Pema Chodron
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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.
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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The only way to ease our pain is to experience it fully. Learn to stay with uneasiness, learn to stay with the tightening, so that the habitual chain reaction doesn't continue to rule your life.
Pema Chodron
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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
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We can let the circumstances of our lives harden us so that we become increasingly resentful and afraid, or we can let them soften us and make us kinder and more open to what scares us. We always have this choice.
Pema Chodron
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it is only to the extent that we are willing to expose ourselves again and again to annihilation that we are able to find that part of ourselves that is indestructible.
Pema Chodron
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According to the Buddhist belief, you can go on and on indefinitely, so you see your life as just a brief moment in time.
Pema Chodron
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Compassion starts with making friends with ourselves.
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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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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Somehow, in the process of trying to deny that things are always changing, we lose our sense of the sacredness of life. We tend to forget that we are part of the natural scheme of things.
Pema Chodron
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While we are sitting in meditation, we are simply exploring humanity and all of creation in the form of ourselves.
Pema Chodron
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When we protect ourselves so we won't feel pain, that protection becomes like armor, like armor that imprisons the softness of of the heart.
Pema Chodron