Author: Pema Chödrön
We cannot be in the present and run our story lines at the same time!
We find that the present moment is a pretty vulnerable place and that this can be completely unnerving and completely tender at the same time.
“But please don’t go away from here thinking that meditation is a vacation from irritation.”
Becoming familiar with fear, looking it right in the eye.
Love. Buddha nature. Courage. These are code words for things we don’t know in our minds, but any of us could experience them.
I was not the ultimate golden girl. I had so much invested in that image of myself, and it just wasn’t holding together anymore.
“Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found in us.”
We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that.
The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen:
When things fall apart and we’re on the verge of we know not what, the test for each of us is to stay on that brink and not concretize.
Thinking that we can find some lasting pleasure and avoid pain is what in Buddhism is called samsara, a hopeless cycle that goes round and round endlessly and causes us to suffer greatly.
Fortunately for me, I could never pull it off. Instinctively I knew that annihilation of my old dependent, clinging self was the only way to go.
To stay with that shakiness—to stay with a broken heart, with a rumbling stomach, with the feeling of hopelessness and wanting to get revenge—that is the path of true awakening.
Meditation is an invitation to notice when we reach our limit and to not get carried away by hope and fear.
How do we work with our minds when we meet our match? Rather than indulge or reject our experience, we can somehow let the energy of the
Emotion, the quality of what we’re feeling, pierce us to the heart. This is easier said than done, but it’s a noble way to live. It’s definitely the path of compassion—the path of cultivating human bravery and kindheartedness.
When we reach our limit, if we aspire to know that place fully—which is to say that we aspire to neither indulge nor repress—a hardness in us will dissolve. We will be softened by the sheer force of whatever energy arises—the energy of anger, the energy of disappointment, the energy of fear.
We sit in meditation so that we’ll be more awake in our lives.
How we stay in the middle between indulging and repressing is by acknowledging whatever arises without judgment, letting the thoughts simply dissolve, and then going back to the openness of this very moment.
Thoughts will run us around in circles if we buy into them, but really they are like dream images. They are like an illusion—not really all that solid. They are, as we say, just thinking.
Instead of struggling against the force of confusion, we could meet it and relax. When we do that, we gradually discover that clarity is always there.
Wisdom mind of rikpa is always here. Whenever we stop talking to ourselves, rikpa is continually here.
But once we’ve touched in with the spaciousness of rikpa, it begins to permeate everything. Once we’ve even had a glimpse of spaciousness, if we practice with maitri, it will continue to expand.
We might sometimes even get the feeling that life is like a dream.
Our personal demons come in many guises. We experience them as shame, as jealousy, as abandonment, as rage. They are anything that makes us so uncomfortable that we continually run away.
Being preoccupied with our self-image is like being deaf and blind.
This is how there could be a sane world. It starts with sane citizens, and that is us.
It’s the practice of not immediately filling up space just because there’s a gap.
Some understanding of how our emotions have the power to run us around in circles. That understanding helps us discover how we increase our pain, how we increase our confusion, how we cause harm to ourselves.
We don’t start blurting out words just because no one else is talking and we’re nervous
We’re at home with ourselves, so we don’t feel that out of nervousness, out of our habitual pattern, we have to run at the mouth.
Our speech is tamed, and when we speak, it communicates. We don’t waste the gift of speech in expressing our neurosis.
As the moments of our lives go by, our ability to be deaf, dumb, and blind just doesn’t work so well anymore. Rather than making us more uptight, interestingly enough, this process liberates us. This is the liberation that naturally arises when we are completely here, without anxiety about imperfection.
Without giving up hope—that there’s somewhere better to be, that there’s someone better to be—we will never relax with where we are or who we are.
We long to have some reliable, comfortable ground under our feet, but we’ve tried a thousand ways to hide and a thousand ways to tie up all the loose ends, and the ground just keeps moving under us.
Dharma isn’t a belief; it isn’t dogma. It is total appreciation of impermanence and change.
Nontheism is finally realizing that there’s no babysitter that you can count on.
We’re all addicted to hope—hope that the doubt and mystery will go away. This addiction has a painful effect on society: a society based on lots of people addicted to getting ground under their feet is not a very compassionate place.
In the world of hope and fear, we always have to change the channel, change the temperature, change the music, because something is getting uneasy,
Notice the panic, notice when you instantly grab for something.
As the Zen master Shunryu Suzuki Roshi said, life is like getting into a boat that’s just about to sail out to sea and sink.
We have a concept of ourselves that we reconstruct moment by moment and reflexively try to protect
The human race is so predictable. A tiny thought arises, then escalates, and before we know what hit us, we’re caught up in hope and
The second kind of loneliness is contentment. When we have nothing, we have nothing to lose.
With cool loneliness we do not expect security from our own internal chatter. That’s why we are instructed to label it “thinking.” It has no objective reality.
Pain is not a punishment; pleasure is not a reward.
Feeling inspired cheers us up, makes us realize how vast and wonderful our world is. Feeling wretched humbles us. The gloriousness of our inspiration connects us with the sacredness of the world.
When you fall in love, recognize it as impermanence, and let that intensify the preciousness. When a relationship ends, recognize it as impermanence.
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.
From an awakened perspective, trying to tie up all the loose ends and finally get it together is death, because it involves rejecting a lot of your basic experience. There is something aggressive about that approach to life, trying to flatten out all the rough spots and imperfections into a nice smooth ride.
Trying to run away is never the answer to being a fully human being.
So the challenge is how to develop compassion right along with clear seeing, how to train in lightening up and cheering up rather than becoming more guilt-ridden and miserable.
Learning how to be kind to ourselves, learning how to respect ourselves, is important.
Everything is equally precious and whole and good, and everyone is equally precious and whole and good.
The only reason that we don’t open our hearts and minds to other people is that they trigger confusion in us that we don’t feel brave enough or sane enough to deal with. To the degree that we look clearly and compassionately at ourselves, we feel confident and fearless about looking into someone else’s eyes.
As long as we don’t want to be honest and kind with ourselves, then we are always going to be infants.
Living on the streets for the last four years. Nobody ever looks at him. No one ever talks to him. Maybe somebody gives him a little money, but nobody ever looks in his face and asks him how he’s doing.
He feels that moving into the areas of society that he had rejected is the same as working with the parts of himself that he had rejected.
If we find ourselves unworkable and give up on ourselves, then we’ll find others unworkable and give up on them.
We may also find that we want to make it “righter” than it is, because we’re a little nervous. Maybe it isn’t exactly living up to our standards, so we justify it and justify it and try to make it extremely right.
Instead of making others right or wrong, or bottling up right and wrong in ourselves, there’s a middle way, a very powerful middle way.
Our protective shells will melt, and we’ll find that more areas of our lives are workable.
The poet Jalaluddin Rumi writes of night travelers who search the darkness instead of running from it, a companionship of people willing to know their own fear.
Whenever we let go of holding on to ourselves and look at the world around us, whenever we connect with sorrow, whenever we connect with joy, whenever we drop our resentment and complaint, in those moments bodhichitta is
This is the core of the practice: breathing in others’ pain so they can be well and have more space to relax and open—breathing out, sending them relaxation or whatever we feel would bring them relief and happiness.
What we do on the outer level has the power to loosen up deep-rooted patterns of holding on to ourselves.
But you jump out and make the fire because the brightness of the day in front of you is bigger than staying in bed.
Bodhisattva politicians, bodhisattva police, bodhisattva parents, bodhisattva bus drivers, bodhisattvas at the bank and the grocery store. In all levels of society we are needed. We are needed to transform our minds and actions for the sake of other people and for the future of the world.
Everything as if it were the only thing in the world that mattered, while all the time knowing that it doesn’t matter at all. That attitude leads to more appreciation and less burnout, because we do the job wholeheartedly and we care. On the other hand, each day is a new
None of what we’ve learned seems very relevant when our lover leaves us, when our child has a tantrum in the supermarket, when we’re insulted by our colleague
“Whatever occurs in the confused mind is regarded as the path. Everything is workable. It is a fearless proclamation, the lion’s roar.” Everything that occurs in our confused mind we can regard as the path. Everything is workable.
When we stop there and don’t act out, don’t repress, don’t blame it on anyone else, and also don’t blame it on ourselves, then we meet with an open-ended question that has no conceptual answer.
But it turns out that this illness has been my greatest gift.” He said, “Now every moment is so precious to me. All the people in my life are so precious to me. My whole life means so much to me.”