Pema Chodron Love Quotes and Sayings
1. If we learn to open our hearts, anyone, including the people who drive us crazy, can be our teacher.
2. When you open yourself to the continually changing, impermanent, dynamic nature of your own being and of reality, you increase your capacity to love and care about other people and your capacity to not be afraid. You’re able to keep your eyes open, your heart open, and your mind open. And you notice when you get caught up in prejudice, bias, and aggression. You develop an enthusiasm for no longer watering those negative seeds, from now until the day you die. And, you begin to think of your life as offering endless opportunities to start to do things differently.
3. We don’t set out to save the world; we set out to wonder how other people are doing and to reflect on how our actions affect other people’s hearts.
4. When you begin to touch your heart or let your heart be touched, you begin to discover that it’s bottomless, that it doesn’t have any resolution, that this heart is huge, vast, and limitless. You begin to discover how much warmth and gentleness is there, as well as how much space.
5. Everybody loves something, even if it’s only tortillas.
6. 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.
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Excerpt from Wikipedia: Pema Chödrön (born Deirdre Blomfield-Brown) is a notable American figure in Tibetan Buddhism. A disciple of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, she is an ordained nun, author, and teacher in the Shambhala Buddhist lineage which Trungpa founded.
A prolific author, she has conducted workshops, seminars, and meditation retreats in Europe, Australia, and throughout North America. She is resident and teacher of Gampo Abbey, a monastery on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, Canada.
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Sayings by Pema Chodron
1. The only reason we don’t open our hearts and minds to other people is that they trigger confusion in us that we don’t feel brave enough or sane enough to deal with. To the degree that we look clearly and compassionately at ourselves, we feel confident and fearless about looking into someone else’s eyes.
2. … feelings like disappointment, embarrassment, irritation, resentment, anger, jealousy, and fear, instead of being bad news, are actually very clear moments that teach us where it is that we’re holding back. They teach us to perk up and lean in when we feel we’d rather collapse and back away. They’re like messengers that show us, with terrifying clarity, exactly where we’re stuck. This very moment is the perfect teacher, and, lucky for us, it’s with us wherever we are.
3. Fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to the truth.
4. The most fundamental aggression to ourselves, the most fundamental harm we can do to ourselves, is to remain ignorant by not having the courage and the respect to look at ourselves honestly and gently.
5. The most difficult times for many of us are the ones we give ourselves.
6. Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It’s a relationship between equals. Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others. Compassion becomes real when we recognize our shared humanity.
7. Rather than letting our negativity get the better of us, we could acknowledge that right now we feel like a piece of shit and not be squeamish about taking a good look.
8. To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest.
9. You are the sky. Everything else – it’s just the weather.
10. Do I prefer to grow up and relate to life directly, or do I choose to live and die in fear?
11. 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.
12. The more we witness our emotional reactions and understand how they work, the easier it is to refrain.
13. True compassion does not come from wanting to help out those less fortunate than ourselves but from realizing our kinship with all beings.
14. It isn’t the things that happen to us in our lives that cause us to suffer, it’s how we relate to the things that happen to us that causes us to suffer.
15. Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know.
16. Every moment is unique, unknown, completely fresh.
17. Learning how to be kind to ourselves, learning how to respect ourselves, is important. The reason it’s important is that, fundamentally, when we look into our own hearts and begin to discover what is confused and what is brilliant, what is bitter and what is sweet, it isn’t just ourselves that we’re discovering. We’re discovering the universe.
18. Meditation practice isn’t about trying to throw ourselves away or become something better. It’s about befriending who we are already.
19. Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible in us be found.
20. We work on ourselves in order to help others, but also we help others in order to work on ourselves.
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Some books by Pema Chodron
