Pema Chödrön - Heart Quotes

22 Sourced Quotes

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Next, feel your heart, literally placing your hand on your chest if you find that helpful. This is a way of accepting yourself just as you are in that moment, a way of saying, "This is my experience right now, and it's okay." Then go into the next moment without any agenda.

Pema Chödrön
Relaxing with something as familiar as loneliness is good discipline for realizing the profundity of the unresolved moments of our lives. We are cheating ourselves when we run away from the ambiguity of loneliness.....Rather than persecuting yourself or feeling that something terribly wrong is happening, right there in the moment of sadness and longing, could you relax and touch the limitless space of the human heart?

Pema Chödrön
If you look back at history or you look at any place in the world where religious groups or ethnic groups or racial groups or political groups are killing each other, or families have been feuding for years and years, you can see - because you're not particularly invested in that particular argument - that there will never be peace until somebody softens what is rigid in their heart.

Pema Chödrön
We can put our whole heart into whatever we do; but if we freeze our attitude into for or against, we're setting ourselves up for stress. Instead, we could just go forward with curiosity, wondering where this experiment will lead. This kind of open-ended inquisitiveness captures the spirit of enthusiasm, or heroic perseverance.

Pema Chödrön
If it's painful, you become willing not just to endure it but also to let it awaken your heart and soften you. You learn to embrace it.

Pema Chödrön
We can stop thinking that good practice is when it's smooth and calm, and bad practice is when it's rough and dark. If we can hold it all in our hearts, then we can make a proper cup of tea.

Pema Chödrön
The idea of karma is that you continually get the teaching that you need to open your heart.

Pema Chödrön
Feel the wounded heart that's underneath the addiction, self-loathing, or anger.

Pema Chödrön
The wisdom, the strength, the confidence - the awakened heart and mind are always accessible -- here, now, always.

Pema Chödrön
This genuine heart of sadness can teach us great compassion. It can humble us when we're arrogant and soften us when we are unkind.

Pema Chödrön
If you follow your heart, you're going to find that it is often extremely inconvenient.

Pema Chödrön
Ordinarily we are swept away by habitual momentum. We don't interrupt our patterns even slightly. With practice, however, we learn to stay with a broken heart, with a nameless fear, with the desire for revenge. Sticking with uncertainty is how we learn to relax in the midst of chaos, how we learn to be cool when the ground beneath us suddenly disappears.

Pema Chödrön
We can begin to open our hearts to others when we have no hope of getting anything back. We just do it for its own sake.

Pema Chödrön
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 much better to turn your attention to the fact that there's an arrow in your heart...

Pema Chödrön
We don't set out to save the world; we set out to wonder how other people are doing and to reflect on how our actions affect other people's hearts.

Pema Chödrön
If we want there to be peace in the world, we have to be brave enough to soften what is rigid in our hearts, to find the soft spot and stay with it. We have to have that kind of courage and take that kind of responsibility. That's the true practice of peace.

Pema Chödrön
So war and peace start in the human heart. Whether that heart is open or whether that heart closes has global implications.

Pema Chödrön
The only reason 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.

Pema Chödrön
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.

Pema Chödrön
The next step is to learn to communicate with the people that you feel are causing your pain and misery- not to learn how to prove them wrong and yourself right but how to communicate from the heart.

Pema Chödrön
When we protect ourselves so we won't feel pain, that protection becomes like armor, like armor that imprisons the softness of of the heart.

Pema Chödrön
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. Sticking with that uncertainty, getting the knack of relaxing in the midst of chaos, learning not to panic-this is the spiritual path.

Pema Chödrön