This page lists some of the all-time best Pema Chödrön quotes. Enjoy!
Page Contents:
- Suffering & Happiness Quotes
- Awakening & Awakeness Quotes
- Presence & Uncertainty Quotes
- Breathing & Meditating Quotes
50+ Pema Chödrön Quotes on Suffering, Awakening, Meditating, & More
Pema Chödrön Quotes on Suffering & Happiness
“Crisis, trauma, a lot of pain of some kind—people who have this are usually the ones who get really serious about the spiritual path and are highly motivated to learn to stay. It’s a blessing in disguise; I think a lot of the spiritual path is about blessings in disguise.” — Pema Chödrön
“Nobody wants to suffer, but our means of going about getting happy are not in sync with our desire to not suffer.” — Pema Chödrön
“It isn’t the things that happen to us in our lives that cause us to suffer, it’s how we relate to the things that happen to us that causes us to suffer.” — Pema Chödrön
“Conviction that sentient beings could be free of suffering; they could end their suffering. That doesn’t mean physical pain, it doesn’t mean outer circumstances being unpleasant, it means what you do with the things that happen.” — Pema Chödrön
“Vulnerability is in the category of things that, if we move toward them, have so much to teach us.” — Pema Chödrön
“Move closer, rather than run away from.” — Pema Chödrön
“Lean into the sharp points and fully experience them.” — Pema Chödrön
“It’s not really trying to cast something out, but about seeing clearly and fully experiencing.” — Pema Chödrön
“When you cut out whole parts of your life that you cannot deal with, you are closing down to life in general.” — Pema Chödrön
“Are you capable of feeling regret without guilt?” — Pema Chödrön
“The upside of difficult times is that it puts you in touch with other people being in the same boat.” — Pema Chödrön
“This is tough, and we’re only human. We can be kind to ourselves and to each other. What else matters at a time like this?” — Pema Chödrön
“Sad is good. Let sad be a connector with humanity. Life has sadness and life has joy. Life has hard times and life has beautiful times. It’s a complete picture. You can’t live a human life without all those aspects being part of it.” — Pema Chödrön
“There’s actually nothing about you that can come up that you can’t say to yourself, ‘It’s essentially no problem; it’s okay’ … Develop that all-embracing attitude towards your very being.” — Pema Chödrön
“It’s okay. What I’m feeling feels horrible, I don’t like it, but fundamentally there’s nothing wrong happening here.” — Pema Chödrön
“I had spent my whole life, my whole personality, was based on not wanting to feel that I wasn’t okay.” — Pema Chödrön
“Catch yourself being critical of yourself. That’s the first step: to really notice how hard you are being on yourself.” — Pema Chödrön
“The gift that I’ve experienced is that whatever is happening, if you don’t judge it, then there’s some kind of ease with whatever happens. But if you call it ‘good’ or ‘bad’, then you begin to get into this kind of war with yourself.” — Pema Chödrön
“If your view is basic badness, you see it wherever you go. If your view is basic goodness, you see it wherever you go.” — Pema Chödrön
“(Happiness is) contentment, at home with yourself in your world, not separating yourself from others, not hardening your heart or your mind to others or to the world, that profound well-being which is not based on facts like changing circumstances.” — Pema Chödrön
“I’m very happy, I feel satisfied with my life, if I died tomorrow I’d feel I hadn’t wasted my life—but my appetite is insatiable, and I feel I have a long way to go in terms of perfection.” — Pema Chödrön
“I’m glad to be alive to agreeable and glad to be alive to disagreeable, and I’m glad to be alive to sour and sweet, and tingly and itchy and refreshing, and cold and hot, and the whole thing.” — Pema Chödrön
“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.” — Pema Chödrön
“You are the sky. Everything else – it’s just the weather.” — Pema Chödrön
Pema Chödrön Quotes on Awakening & Awakeness
“To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-man’s-land, to experience each moment as completely new and fresh. To live is to be willing to die over and over again.” — Pema Chödrön
“The essence of bravery is being without self-deception … Self-deception is lying to yourself. It takes a lot of bravery to stop lying to yourself because why in the world are you lying to yourself to begin with? It’s because there’s something under there, some truth, that is very painful to actually fully acknowledge with kindness and love.” — Pema Chödrön
“The whole point is to notice what’s happening with kindness, sense of humor, gentle touch, but also be almost ruthlessly honest moving toward the place of no self-deception or nothing to hide from yourself. If you can combine that moving in the direction of nothing to hide from yourself with humor and loving kindness then the whole thing begins to transform your being.” — Pema Chödrön
“You really get transformed in the process. First of all, you give up that strong identity of being that other person, you go through the very profound questioning of, ‘Who am I now?’, and that gets you closer to realizing you’re not fixed, your not a fixed identity.” — Pema Chödrön
“The main thing is free from fixed mind.” — Pema Chödrön
“Notice your discursive thoughts and habitual patterns around not being the person that you always identified with.” — Pema Chödrön
“Awakeness is found in our pleasure and our pain, our confusion and our wisdom, available in each moment of our weird, unfathomable, ordinary everyday lives.” — Pema Chödrön
“Whatever arises is fresh—the essence of realization. Whatever arises in our body or in the confused mind, it’s regarded as the essence of realization. Whatever arises. If you cling to it as ‘I’m doing well now’ or ‘this is how it’s supposed to be’, that’s adding something extra. If you panic or criticize, that’s adding something extra. On the other hand, even the panic and the praise are whatever arises, is fresh, the essence of realization.” — Pema Chödrön
“Buddha for me is that awakened mind itself—that totally open, unbiased, unprejudiced mind and heart. I resonate with that, and I come back again and again to that mind and heart as the motivating factor of my life. I think of that as—if you use the word ‘Christ consciousness’—’Buddha consciousness’ or ‘Buddha-nature.’” — Pema Chödrön
“Buddha taught that everybody—every living being without exception—has the potential to awaken.” — Pema Chödrön
“My main faith is that sentient beings have the capacity to awaken.” — Pema Chödrön
“My main passion in life is to awaken myself. I believe that everybody could do that, and I will devote my life—to the degree that I can awaken—to trying to inspire other people to awaken.” — Pema Chödrön
“Somehow you find your niche or something where you always are somewhat on fire with positive inspiration—not even for your cause or something, but you found something in your life that gives a deep meaning and that doesn’t run out.” — Pema Chödrön
“I want to go deeper, but the only reason I want to go deeper is to be there for other people in increasingly difficult situations.” — Pema Chödrön
“The path is about how the individual works with their own mind and how that affects the family, the society, the nation, the world.” — Pema Chödrön
“It really doesn’t matter what religion we are—we can be a fundamentalist or a non-violent, non-aggressive propagator of love in the world and fellowship of humanity.” — Pema Chödrön
“The few people I’ve met in my life that I consider to be completely awake, they learn to stay. That’s what you feel, you feel the sense of eternal present. They don’t go off anywhere like we do, they just stay. That seems to be what enlightenment is; it’s the simplest thing and the most profound thing at the same time.“ — Pema Chödrön
Pema Chödrön Quotes on Presence & Uncertainty
“The best spiritual instruction is when you wake up in the morning and say, ‘I wonder what’s going to happen today’ and then carry that kind of curiosity through your life.” — Pema Chödrön
“In the Buddhist teachings, I say that the root of the problem is actually self-absorption, this fear of being present.” — Pema Chödrön
“There’s a lot of ways to talk about ego-clinging, but in essence, it’s the fact that we are never present. There’s a sort of deep-seated almost compulsion to distract ourselves.” — Pema Chödrön
“Distractions are not just phone calls and emails and outer phenomena. Our own mind, and our longings, and our cravings, and our fantasies, and everything are also major distractions.” — Pema Chödrön
“We’re always seeking ground—that’s the basis of what we call self-absorption or ego-clinging—always seeking something to hold on to. What the Buddha’s teachings say is the fundamental state is always changing, fluid and open. That the natural state is that it’s unfixated and open, and there really is nothing to hold on to. This is not bad news, and there is no reason to freak out about this, but we all seem to be programmed in denial. We don’t like the insecurity. Someone said insecurity is ego’s take on the wide-open, clear, unfettered, fresh space, and we find that extremely uncomfortable.” — Pema Chödrön
“A lot of us are just running around in circles pretending that there’s ground where there actually isn’t any ground. Somehow if we could learn to not be afraid of groundlessness, not be afraid of insecurity and uncertainty, it would be calling on an inner strength that would allow us to be open, and free, and loving, and compassionate in any situation.” — Pema Chödrön
“What we discipline is not our ‘badness’ or our ‘wrongness.’ What we discipline is any form of potential escape from reality. In other words, discipline allows us to be right here and connect with the richness of the moment.” — Pema Chödrön
“Fully present is a wide-awake state where your sense perceptions are wide open. It’s if you could imagine seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, and so forth without any filter between you and your experience.” — Pema Chödrön
“The present moment is the doorway to liberation, vastness, unobstructed quality of our mind.” — Pema Chödrön
“Begin to connect with the open, unobstructed, clarity of your own being and of every moment.” — Pema Chödrön
“Letting there be room for not knowing is the most important thing of all.” — Pema Chödrön
“My whole life I’ve had that instinct of what’s forward … Somehow there’s always forward.” — Pema Chödrön
“In my life when I’ve had certain thoughts, I say this is a ‘forward thought’, and I have to follow it. It just happens every so often.” — Pema Chödrön
Pema Chödrön Quotes on Breathing & Meditating
“Anyone who has meditated even one day learned fast that we are almost never present.” — Pema Chödrön
“What we find if we’re not used to sitting quietly with ourselves—not used to meditation, not used to having any inner solitude in our lives—is that we’re very threatened by nothing happening.” — Pema Chödrön
“People who meditate do become much more in tune with being able to notice that they’ve been hooked and then also notice what they’re saying to themselves … It does give you more clarity about what’s going on with you.” — Pema Chödrön
“I have this lousy meditation that doesn’t bother me anymore because whatever arises is the fresh, and I know that’s absolutely true. I just have this hopelessly, unworkable, non-meditative mind, and I’ve devoted my whole life to it and talked to millions of people about it, but it’s like completely absurd.” — Pema Chödrön
“You have this direct experience. And what is experiencing? That’s your wisdom, that’s the space that always exists in your mind—the ability to just have a direct perception.” — Pema Chödrön
“Everyone needs some solitude in their life … You find time out in the busyness of the whole thing.” — Pema Chödrön
“There’s nothing that does not grow easier through familiarity. Putting up with little cares, I’ll train myself to work with great adversity.” — Pema Chödrön
“What we train in is not struggling.” — Pema Chödrön
“Wisdom is inherent in emotions … Every emotion is imbued with a wisdom quality.” — Pema Chödrön
“When we pause, allow a gap and breathe deeply, we can experience instant refreshment. Suddenly, we slow down, look out, and there’s the world.” — Pema Chödrön
“Words direct you in a certain direction. They don’t really tell you how to, but each person finds their way to hold this in the cradle of loving-kindness.” — Pema Chödrön
“To move is really almost essential in terms of crawling out of your skin.” — Pema Chödrön
“Remain embodied. Keep touching in physically with how you’re feeling. It’s like self-reflection, but at the level of the physical body.” — Pema Chödrön
“The type of meditations that allow you to become extremely familiar with your own mind and your own habitual patterns with an attitude of acceptance and loving-kindness … Some kind of somatic training—the ability to stay with your body, to feel your body, to be able to have a sense of your body.” — Pema Chödrön
Compassionate Abiding Practice (precursor of Tonglen): First, contact the feeling, and put your hand gently there. Breathe it in deeply with the sense of breathing it into the heart, breathing it into the whole body, breathing it in with a feeling of opening to it with kindness and warmth; not with fear or hatred. Deep in-breath and then send out that kindness, that compassion, that love, that heartfelt appreciation. Space, relaxation, relief.
Tonglen Practice: ‘Tonglen’ is a Tibetan word that means ‘taking in, and sending out.’ If you’ve been doing the compassionate abiding practice, then you just take it another step. If you do it for 10-20 minutes with your own feeling of groundlessness/fear, then a good way to end is to let it be your link with what everybody else is going through. You breathe in for that feeling and you’re opening your heart, and then you say millions of people right now are feeling exactly like this. Since you’re feeling it anyway, it’s your doorway, it’s your connection, your stepping stone for understanding what other people feel too. And you breathe out and you send out that sense of relief, relaxing, and slowing down. Breathe it out for everyone. Your pain and is the connection with other people’s pain, and when you breathe out, your sense of relaxation is your connection with wanting other people to feel that sense of relaxation. Whatever you’re feeling is sort of shared with everybody else, so there’s a sense of empathetic compassionate love and caring for each other. Breathe in with a sense of may we all be free of suffering, and when you breathe out may we all have love, and caring, and the feeling of interconnectedness in our life.
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