Pema Chodron
Pema Chodron
Pema Chödrönis an American, Tibetan Buddhist. She is an ordained nun, acharya and disciple of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. Chodron has written several books and is the director of the Gampo Abbey in Nova Scotia, Canada...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionClergyman
Date of Birth14 July 1936
CountryUnited States of America
writing moments
The future is completely open and we are writing it moment to moment.
moving ignorance passion
Underneath our ordinary lives, underneath all the talking we do, all the moving we do, all the thoughts in our minds, there's a fundamental groundlessness. It's there bubbling along all the time. We experience it as restlessness and edginess. We experience it as fear. It motivates passion, aggression, ignorance, jealousy, and pride, but we never get down to the essence of it.
energy moments uncomfortable
When we are willing to stay even a moment with uncomfortable energy, we gradually learn not to fear it.
underestimate recognizing never-underestimate
Never underestimate the power of compassionately recognizing what's going on.
heart follow-your-heart ifs
If you follow your heart, you're going to find that it is often extremely inconvenient.
thinking wish accepting
I can't overestimate the importance of accepting ourselves exactly as we are right now, not as we wish we were or think we ought to be.
kindness people doe
As our kindness for ourselves grows, so does our kindness for other people.
thinking people brave
Usually we think that brave people have no fear. The truth is that they are intimate with fear.
positive use wakes-you
Use your life to wake you up.
feelings stories feels
Feel the feelings and drop the story.
fall space waiting
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 well as fundamental spaciousness. -Pema Chodron, from "When Things Fall Apart
heart opening-our-hearts touched
When you begin to touch your heart or let your heart be touched, you begin to discover that it's bottomless.
fall essence safety
We spend all our energy and waste our lives trying to re-create these zones of safety, which are always falling apart. That's the essence of samsara - the cycle of suffering that comes from continuing to seek happiness in all the wrong places.
respect sweet confused
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.