Pema Chödrön Quotes

American philosopher

Pema Chödrön (born Deirdre Blomfield-Brown, July 14, 1936) is an American Tibetan Buddhist. She is an ordained nun, formerAcharya of Shambhala Buddhism and disciple of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. Chödrön has written books and audiobooks, and is principal teacher at Gampo Abbey in Nova Scotia. Chödrön teaches the traditional "Yarne" retreat at Gampo Abbey each winter and the Guide to the Bodhisattva's Way of Life in Berkeley each summer.

From: Wikiquote (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Birth Name: Deirdre Blomfield-Brown

Alternative Names: Ane Pema Chodron

From Wikidata (CC0)

Meditation helps you to meet your edge; it’s where you actually come up against it and you start to lose it.

The experience of a sad and tender heart is what gives birth to fearlessness.

But there is that feeling. And there’s always another challenge, and that keeps us humble. Life knocks you off your pedestal.

We can't control what's going to happen but we can grow in awareness of what is happening.

When we multitask and split up our mind into a million directions, we are actually creating our own suffering, because these habits strengthen strong emotional reactivity and discursive thought.

But the Buddhist teachings are not only about removing the symptoms of suffering, they’re about actually removing the cause, or the root, of suffering.

Meditation is just gently coming back again and again to what's right here.

The principle of nowness is very important to any effort to establish an enlightened society.

The natural quality of mind is clear, awake, alert, and knowing. Free from fixation. By training in being present, we come to know the nature of our mind. So the more you train in being present - being right here - the more you begin to feel like your mind is sharpening up. The mind that can come back to the present is clearer and more refreshed, and it can better weather all the ambiguities, pains, and paradoxes of life.

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

Meditation is an invitation to notice when we reach our limit and to not get carried away by hope and fear.

This very moment is the perfect teacher, and, lucky for us, it’s with us wherever we are.

Generally speaking, we regard discomfort in any form as bad news. But for practitioners or spiritual warriors — people who have a certain hunger to know what is true — feelings like disappointment, embarrassment, irritation, resentment, anger, jealousy, and fear, instead of being bad news, are actually very clear moments that... teach us to perk up and lean in when we feel we’d rather collapse and back away.

Every day, at the moment when things get edgy, we can just ask ourselves, “Am I going to practice peace, or am I going to war?”

Life is a good teacher and a good friend. Things are always in transition, if we could only realize it.