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
thinking people brave
Usually we think that brave people have no fear. The truth is that they are intimate with fear.
positive use wakes-you
Use your life to wake you up.
feelings stories feels
Feel the feelings and drop the story.
fall space waiting
It's a transformative experience to simply pause instead of immediately fill up the space. By waiting, we begin to connect with fundamental restlessness as well as fundamental spaciousness. -Pema Chodron, from "When Things Fall Apart
heart opening-our-hearts touched
When you begin to touch your heart or let your heart be touched, you begin to discover that it's bottomless.
fall essence safety
We spend all our energy and waste our lives trying to re-create these zones of safety, which are always falling apart. That's the essence of samsara - the cycle of suffering that comes from continuing to seek happiness in all the wrong places.
buddhist heart arrows
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...
space filling-up spaciousness
It's a transformative experience to simply pause instead of immediately filling up space.
honesty wall moving
Rather than going after our walls and barriers with a sledgehammer, we pay attention to them. With gentleness and honesty, we move closer to those walls. We touch them and smell them and get to know them well. We begin a process of acknowledging our aversions and our cravings. We become familiar with the strategies and beliefs we use to build the walls: What are the stories I tell myself? What repels me and what attracts me? We start to get curious about what’s going on.
moving comfort uncharted
This moving away from comfort and security, this stepping out into what is unknown, uncharted and shaky - that's called liberation.
buddhist mind suffering
As human beings, not only do we seek resolution, but we also feel that we deserve resolution. However, not only do we not deserve resolution, we suffer from resolution. We don't deserve resolution; we deserve something better than that. We deserve our birthright, which is the middle way, an open state of mind that can relax with paradox and ambiguity.
teacher peace inspirational-love
If we learn to open our hearts, anyone, including the people who drive us crazy, can be our teacher.
our-world feel-good want
We feel that we have to be right so that we can feel good. We don’t want to be wrong because then we’ll feel bad. But we could be more compassionate toward all these parts of ourselves. The whole right and wrong business closes us down and makes our world smaller. Wanting situations and relationships to be solid, permanent, and graspable obscures the pith of the matter, which is that things are fundamentally groundless.
pain loss suffering
Instead of asking ourselves, 'How can I find security and happiness?' we could ask ourselves, 'Can I touch the center of my pain? Can I sit with suffering, both yours and mine, without trying to make it go away? Can I stay present to the ache of loss or disgrace-disapp ointment in all its many forms-and let it open me?' This is the trick.