Quote

Tonglen practice begins to dissolve the illusion that each of us is alone with this personal suffering that no one else can understand.

Pema Chodron

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Pema Chodron
Age: 88
Born: 1936
Born: July 14
Clergyman
Philosopher
Writer
New York City
New York
Deirdre Blomfield-Brow
Illusion
Personal
Alone
Practice
Suffering
Understand
Else
Dissolve
Begins

More quotes by Pema Chodron

Image
The essence of generosity is letting go. Pain is always a sign that we are holding on to something - usually ourselves.
Pema Chodron
Image
One way to practice staying present is to simply sit still for a while and listen. For one minute, listen to the sounds close to you. For one minute, listen to the sounds at a distance. Just listen attentively.
Pema Chodron
Image
If it's painful, you become willing not just to endure it but also to let it awaken your heart and soften you. You learn to embrace it.
Pema Chodron
Image
When you begin to touch your heart or let your heart be touched, you begin to discover that it's bottomless.
Pema Chodron
Image
To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-man's-land, to experience each moment as completely new and fresh. To live is to be willing to die over and over again.
Pema Chodron
Image
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.
Pema Chodron
Image
There are many changes in the weather of a day.
Pema Chodron
Image
The truth is that good and bad coexist sour and sweet coexist. They aren't really opposed to each other.
Pema Chodron
Image
Buddhism itself is all about empowering yourself, not about getting what you want.
Pema Chodron
Image
Compassion practice is daring. It involves learning to relax and allowing ourselves to move gently toward what scares us.
Pema Chodron
Image
Few of us are satisfied with retreating from the world and just working on ourselves. We want our training to manifest and to be of benefit. The bodhisattva-warrior, therefore, makes a vow to wake up not just for himself but for the welfare of all beings.
Pema Chodron
Image
If you work with your mind, that will alleviate all the suffering that seems to come from the outside.
Pema Chodron
Image
Unconditional good heart toward others is not even a possibility unless we attend to our own demons.
Pema Chodron
Image
All situations teach you, and often it's the tough ones that teach you best.
Pema Chodron
Image
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
Image
Patience is the training in abiding with the restlessness of our energy and letting things evolve at their own speed.
Pema Chodron
Image
What you do for yourself, you're doing for others, and what you do for others, you're doing for yourself.
Pema Chodron
Image
In the most ordinary terms, egolessness is a flexible identity. It manifests as inquisitiveness , as adaptability, as humor, as playfulness. It is our capacity to relax with not knowing, not figuring everything out, with not being at all sure who we are, or who anyone else is, either.
Pema Chodron
Image
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
Image
Rejoicing in ordinary things is not sentimental or trite. It actually takes guts. Each time we drop our complaints and allow everyday good fortune to inspire us, we enter the warrior's world.
Pema Chodron