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The real thing that we renounce is the tenacious hope that we could be saved from being who we are.

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
Renounce
Saved
Hope
Real
Thing
Tenacious

More quotes by Pema Chodron

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Things are as bad and as good as they seem. There's no need to add anything extra.
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The future is the result of what we do right now.
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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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Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible in us be found.
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Sitting meditation gives us a way to move closer to our thoughts and emotions and to get in touch with our bodies.
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Each of us has a soft spot: the place in our experience where we feel vulnerable and tender. This soft spot is inherent in appreciation and love, and it is equally inherent in pain.
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To live is to be willing to die over and over again.
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Knowing pain is a very important ingredient of being there for another person.
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Discomfort of any kind becomes the basis for practice. We breathe in knowing our pain is shared.
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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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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.
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While we are sitting in meditation, we are simply exploring humanity and all of creation in the form of ourselves.
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If someone comes along and shoots an arrow into your heart, it's fruitless to stand there and yell at the person. It would be much better to turn your attention to the fact that there's an arrow in your heart.
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What you do for yourself, you're doing for others, and what you do for others, you're doing for yourself.
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Patience is not learned in safety.
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Never underestimate the desire to bolt.
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Don't worry about achieving. Don't worry about perfection. Just be there each moment as best you can. When you realize you've wandered off again, simply very lightly acknowledge that. This light touch is the golden key to reuniting with our openness.
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Meditation practice isn’t about trying to throw ourselves away and become something better. It’s about befriending who we are already. The ground of practice is you or me or whoever we are right now, just as we are. That’s the ground, that’s what we study, that’s what we come to know with tremendous curiosity and interest.
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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
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Softening what is rigid in our hearts.
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