Pema Chodron
Pema Chodron
Pema Chödrönis an American, Tibetan Buddhist. She is an ordained nun, acharya and disciple of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. Chodron has written several books and is the director of the Gampo Abbey in Nova Scotia, Canada...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionClergyman
Date of Birth14 July 1936
CountryUnited States of America
real dust clouds
If we knew that tonight we were going to go blind, we would take a long, last real look at every blade of grass, every cloud formation, every speck of dust, every rainbow, raindrop-everything.
loneliness thinking compassion
Cool loneliness allows us to look honestly and without aggressionat our own minds. We can gradually drop our ideals of who we think weought to be, or who we think we want to be, or who we think other peoplethink we want to be or ought to be. We give it up and just look directlywith compassion and humor at who we are. Then loneliness is no threat andheartache, no punishment.
weather shifting mood
My moods are continuously shifting like the weather.
beautiful interesting together
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.
add matter
Words themselves are neutral. It's the charge we add to them that matters
practice negativity aversion
To cultivate equanimity we practice catching ourselves when we feel attraction or aversion, before it hardens into grasping or negativity.
unlimited-potential down-and becoming
By becoming intimate with how we close down and how we open up, we awaken our unlimited potential.
practice burden
We practice to liberate ourselves from a burden
fall compassion mind
The trick is to keep exploring and not bail out, even when we find out that something is not what we thought. That's what we're going to discover again and again and again. Nothing is what we thought. I can say that with great confidence. Emptiness is not what we thought. Neither is mindfulness or fear. Compassion––not what we thought. Love. Buddha nature. Courage. These are code words for things we don't know in our minds, but any of us could experience them. These are words that point to what life really is when we let things fall apart and let ourselves be nailed to the present moment.
reality enlightenment spirituality
Enlightenment is a direct experience with reality.
attachment want sometimes
Sometimes we find that we like our thoughts so much that we don't want to let them go.
appreciation pain vulnerable
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.
suffering illusion
Tonglen practice begins to dissolve the illusion that each of us is alone with this personal suffering that no one else can understand.
knowing relax identity
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.