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Life Quotes by Pema Chödrön

97 Life quotes by Pema Chödrön

All Life quotes Pema Chödrön’s page

Pema Chödrön encourages us to stay awake and curious, letting life’s moments wake us instead of putting us to sleep. She advises patience when joy or pain arise, and she describes life as a mandala where everything circles around us. She warns that resisting life feels like hell.

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“Hell is just resistance to life.”

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Use your life to wake you up.

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“The essence of life is that it’s challenging.”

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“LIFE is a good teacher and a good friend.”

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Allow situations in your life to become your teacher.

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“Don’t let life harden your heart.”

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“Everything in our lives can wake us up or put us to sleep, and basically it's up to us to let it…

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Everything in our lives has the potential to wake us up or put us to sleep. Allowing it to awaken us is…

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“The way to dissolve our resistance to life is to meet it face-to-face.”

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Better to join in with humanity than to set ourselves apart.

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Life's work is to wake up, to let the things that enter your life wake you up rather than put you to…

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This is the tendency of all living things: to avoid pain and to cling to pleasure.

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Simply be present with your own shifting energies and with the unpredictabilit y of life as it unfolds.

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We can spend our whole lives escaping from the monsters of our minds. (36)

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Somehow, in the process of trying to deny that things are always changing, we lose our sense of the sacredness of life.…

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The second noble truth says that this resistance is the...mechanism of what we call ego, that resisting life causes suffering.

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“The second noble truth says that resistance is the fundamental operating mechanism of what we call ego, that resisting life causes suffering.”

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“Awakeness is found in our pleasure and our pain, our confusion and our wisdom, available in each moment of our weird, unfathomable,…

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There isn't anything except your own life that can be used as ground for your spiritual practice. Spiritual practice is your life,…

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“We start by working with the monsters in our mind. Then we develop the wisdom and compassion to communicate sanely with the…

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You must learn to sit with the restless, painful energy and not let the momentum pull you under and cause you to…

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“IMPERMANENCE means that the essence of life is fleeting. Some people are so skillful at their mindfulness practice that they can actually…

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“It's as if you just looked at yourself in the mirror, and you saw a gorilla. The mirror's there; it's showing you,…

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“LIFE’S work is to wake up, to let the things that enter into your life wake you up rather than put you…

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Each moment is just what it is. It might be the only moment of our life; it might be the only strawberry…

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“If you can live with the sadness of human life (what Rinpoche often called the tender heart or the genuine heart of…

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When Things Fall Apart” and I quote “Life is a good teacher and a good friend. Things are always in transition, if…

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That nothing is static or fixed, that all is fleeting and impermanent, is the first mark of existence. It is the ordinary…

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To lead a life that goes beyond pettiness and prejudice and always wanting to make sure that everything turns out on our…

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At least once a year, I imagine that I am about to die. Looking back as truthfully as I can at my…

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Our wisdom is all mixed up with what we call our neurosis. Our brilliance, our juiciness, our spiciness, is all mixed up…

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When you open yourself to the continually changing, impermanent, dynamic nature of your own being and of reality, you increase your capacity…

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“There is a story of a woman running away from tigers. She runs and runs and the tigers are getting closer and…

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Holding on to beliefs limits our experience of life. That doesn't mean that beliefs or ideas or thinking is a problem; the…

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The mind is very wild. The human experience is full of unpredictability and paradox, joys and sorrows, successes and failures. We can't…

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“Not long ago, I read an interview with the war correspondent Chris Hedges in which he used a phrase that seemed like…

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“Life is glorious, but life is also wretched. It is both. Appreciating the gloriousness inspires us, encourages us, cheers us up, gives…

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“A human being is a part of the whole called by us “the universe,” a part limited in time and space. He…

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Life is like that. We don't know anything. We call something bad; we call it good. But really we just don't know.

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“Life is like stepping into a boat that is about to sail out to sea and sink. —SHUNRYU SUZUKI ROSHI A”

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More by Pema Chödrön

“LIFE’S work is to wake up, to let the things that enter into your life wake you up rather than put you to sleep.…

Since death is certain and the time of death is uncertain, what is the most important thing?

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The essence of generosity is letting go. Pain is always a sign that we are holding on to something - usually ourselves.

“If the object of meditation were something concrete, something solid and graspable - an image or a statue or a dot on the floor…

It's a transformative experience to simply pause instead of immediately fill up the space. By waiting, we begin to connect with fundamental restlessness as…

“The essence of life is that it’s challenging. Sometimes it is sweet, and sometimes it is bitter. Sometimes your body tenses, and sometimes it…

If we run a hundred miles an hour to the other end of the continent in order to get away from the obstacle, we…

“But in this meditation technique, we are with the out-breath; there's no particular instruction about what to do until the next out-breath.”

“Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know. Nothing ever really attacks us except our own confusion. Perhaps…

So even if the hot loneliness is there, and for 1.6 seconds we sit with that restlessness when yesterday we couldn't sit for even…

If you have rage and righteously act it out and blame it all on others, it's really you who suffers. The other people and…

“When we realize that the path is the goal, there’s a sense of workability. Trungpa Rinpoche said, “Whatever occurs in the confused mind is…

Every day is a new opportunity to work with what you have inside toward enlightenment.

If someone comes along and shoots an arrow into your heart, it’s fruitless to stand there and yell at the person. It would be…