Pema Chödron citations

“When you begin to touch your heart or let your heart be touched, you begin to discover that it's bottomless.”

“It isn't what happens to us that causes us to suffer; it's what we say to ourselves about what happens.”

“Change your attitude, but remain natural.”

“The truth you believe and cling to makes you unavailable to hear anything new.”

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

“To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest.”

“If we learn to open our hearts, anyone, including the people who drive us crazy, can be our teacher.”

“The future is completely open, and we are writing it moment to moment.”

“This is a standard meditation instruction that you can embody in the entirety of your life: do not act out and do not repress. See what happens if you don’t do either of those things.”

“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.”

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

“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 things fall apart and we’re on the verge of we know not what, the test of each of us is to stay on that brink and not concretize.”

“Emptiness is not what we thought. Neither is mindfulness or fear. Compassion—not what we thought. Love. Buddha nature. Courage.”

“The trick is to keep exploring and not bail out, even when we find out that something is not what we thought... Nothing is what we thought.”

“In fact, anyone who stands on the edge of the unknown, fully in the present without reference point, experiences groundlessness.”

“Impermanence becomes vivid in the present moment; so do compassion and wonder and courage. And so does fear.”

“Fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to the truth.”

“We all need to be reminded and encouraged to relax with whatever arises and bring whatever we encounter to the path.”

“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.”