"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."
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Quote collection
Pema Chodron quotes (page 6 of 23)
453 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Treat yourself as your own beloved child."
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"If we run a hundred miles an hour to the other end of the continent in order to get away from the obstacle, we find the very same problem waiting for us when we arrive. It just keeps returning with new names, forms, manifestations until we learn whatever it has to teach us about where we are separating ourselves from reality, how we are pulling back instead of opening up, closing down instead of allowing ourselves to experience fully whatever we encounter, without hesitating or retreating into ourselves."
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"We can begin to open our hearts to others when we have no hope of getting anything back. We just do it for its own sake."
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"You're the only one who knows when you're using things to protect yourself and keep your ego together and when you're opening and letting things fall apart, letting the world come as it is - working with it rather than struggling against it. You're the only one who knows."
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"Every day is a new opportunity to work with what you have inside toward enlightenment."
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"The still lake without ripples is an image of our minds at ease, so full of unlimited friendliness for all the junk at the bottom of the lake that we don't feel the need to churn up the waters just to avoid looking at what's there."
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"Being fully present isn’t something that happens once and then you have achieved it; it’s being awake to the ebb and flow and movement and creation of life, being alive to the process of life itself."
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"Feel the wounded heart that's underneath the addiction, self-loathing, or anger."
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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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"Use what seems like poison as medicine. Use your personal suffering as the path to compassion for all beings."
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"Pain is not a punishment; pleasure is not a reward."
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"As long as we're caught up in always looking for certainty and happiness, rather than honoring the taste and smell and quality of exactly what is happening, as long as we're always running from discomfort, we're going to be caught in a cycle of unhappiness and discomfort, and we will feel weaker and weaker. This way of seeing helps us develop inner strength. And what's especially encouraging is the view that inner strength is available to us at just the moment when we think that we've hit the bottom, when things are at their worst."
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"Generosity is an activity that loosens us up. By offering whatever we can - a dollar, a flower, a word of encouragement - we are training in letting go."
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"Obstacles are our friends: they teach us where we're stuck."
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"The ego seeks to divide and separate. Spirit seeks to unify and heal."
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"When we practice generating compassion, we can expect to experience our fear of pain. Compassion practice is daring. It involves learning to relax and allow ourselves to move gently toward what scares us. The trick to doing this is to stay with emotional distress without tightening into aversion, to let fear soften us rather than harden into resistance."
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"True compassion does not come from wanting to help out those less fortunate than ourselves but from realizing our kinship with all beings."
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"Deep down in the human spirit, there is a reservoir of courage. It is always available, always waiting to be discovered."
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"Someone needs to encourage us not to brush aside what we feel. Not to be ashamed of the love and grief that it arouses in us. Not to be afraid of pain. Someone needs to encourage us: that this soft spot in us could be awakened, and that to do this would change our lives."
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