Pema Chödrön Quotes

Tonglen practice (and all meditation practice) is not about later, when you get it all together and you’re this person you really respect. You may be the most violent person in the world — that’s a fine place to start. That’s a very rich place to start — juicy, smelly. You might be the most depressed person in the world, the most addicted person in the world, the most jealous person in the world. You might think that there are no others on the planet who hate themselves as much as you do. All of that is a good place to start. Just where you are — that’s the place to start.

Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know.

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.

Through meditation, we’re able to see clearly what’s going on with our thoughts and emotions, and we can also let them go.

Pain is not a punishment, pleasure is not a reward.

We can use our personal suffering as the path to compassion for all beings.

Resistance to unwanted circumstances has the power to keep those circumstances alive and well for a very long time.

The spiritual journey is not about heaven and finally getting to a place that’s really swell. In fact, that way of looking at things is what keeps us miserable.

When there’s a big disappointment, we don’t know if that’s the end of the story. It may be just the beginning of a great adventure.

We are not striving to make pain go away or to become a better person. In fact, we are giving up control altogether and letting concepts and ideals fall apart. This starts with realizing that whatever occurs is neither the beginning nor the end. It is just the same kind of normal human experience that’s been happening to everyday people from the beginning of time.

The first noble truth of the Buddha is that when we feel suffering, it doesn’t mean that something is wrong. What a relief. Finally somebody told the truth. Suffering is part of life, and we don’t have to feel it’s happening because we personally made the wrong move. In reality, however, when we feel suffering, we think that something is wrong. As long as we’re addicted to hope, we feel that we can tone our experience down or liven it up or change it somehow, and we continue to suffer a lot.

nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know
…nothing ever really attacks us except our own confusion. perhaps there is no solid obstacle except our own need to protect ourselves from being touched. maybe the only enemy is that we don’t like the way reality is now and therefore wish it would go away fast. but what we find as practitioners is that nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know. 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.

It helps to remember that our spiritual practice is not about accomplishing anything — not about winning or losing — but about ceasing to struggle and relaxing as it is.

Awakening is not a process of building ourselves up but a process of letting go. It’s a process of relaxing in the middle — the paradoxical, ambiguous middle, full of potential, full of new ways of thinking and seeing — with absolutely no money-back guarantee of what will happen next.

We can begin anything we do — start our day, eat a meal, or walk into a meeting — with the intention to be open, flexible, and kind. Then we can proceed with an inquisitive attitude. As my teacher Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche used to say, “Live your life as an experiment.