Pema Chodron Quotes

All the shitty stuff people do to themselves... it can all be the same thing, you know? Just a way to drown out your own voice. To kill your memories without having to kill yourself.

External means of escape like alcohol, drug use, and even overeating are a means of pushing uncertainty away and covering it up temporarily. And they may feel comforting for a moment, but I don't need to tell you that eventually they will cause more trouble than they ever solve.

I have a lot of friends who are trying to clean up their act, or that are still making trouble for themselves, so I'm definitely well-versed on what goes on in the mind and the heart of a person who self-destructs as their coping mechanism, and also what they're like when you take their preferred substance away.

I know a man who gave up smoking, drinking, sex, and rich food. He was healthy right up to the day he killed himself.

I think drugs were used by me as a way of suppressing my natural spirit.

Uncontrolled temper is soon dissipated on others. Resentment, bitterness, and self-pity build up inside our hearts and eat away at our spiritual lives like a slowly spreading cancer.

When you're an addict, you can go without feeling anything except drunk or stoned or hungry. Still, when you compare this to other feelings, to sadness, anger, fear, worry, despair, and depression, well, an addiction no longer looks so bad. It looks like a very viable option.

Hope is the crystal meth of emotions. It hooks you fast and kills you hard.

This violent rage that turned inward cannot be helped by drink.

I was hell bent on destruction... it was like being possessed by a demon.

One thing I'm recognizing more and more in myself - and looking to change - is going down more of a self-destructive path when I feel pain. I'm trying to avoid that as much as possible. That is an impulse, when I feel out of control.

Numbing the pain for a while will make it worse when you finally feel it.

Bad feeling is a country no woman want to visit. So they take good feeling any which way it come. Sometime that good feeling come by taking on a different kind of bad feeling.

When the beginnings of self destruction enter the heart, it seems no bigger than a grain of sand.

Drugs or overeating or alcohol or sex, it was all just another way to find peace. To escape what we know. Our education. Our bite of the apple.

All the Hennessy and weed can't hide, the pain i feel inside, its like I'm living just to die.

We destroy ourselves when we stop feeling. If you bury your feelings within you, you become a graveyard.

Throughout the ordeal, I learned that getting mad was easier than being sad. Anger was something I could control. I could settle into an easy rhythm of blame and hate. Focus my energy on something than the ache in my heart.

And the wicked thing is, that when we're really upset, we always take it out on the people who are closest and whom we love the most.

It is important not to suppress your feelings altogether when you are depressed. It is equally important to avoid terrible arguments or expressions of outrage. You should steer clear of emotionally damaging behavior. People forgive, but it is best not to stir things up to the point at which forgiveness is required. When you are depressed, you need the love of other people, and yet depression fosters actions that destroy that love. Depressed people often stick pins into their own life rafts. The conscious mind can intervene. One is not helpless.

Emotional pain makes me want to isolate. Or hit back. It's very tough to rise above my natural inclinations. I'm always working on this.

Hate hurts the hater more'n the hated.

Every stroke our fury strikes is sure to hit ourselves at last.

I went to the worst of bars hoping to get killed but all I could do was to get drunk again.

I'd be in my hotel room, smoking too much, drinking, going to clubs, just being numb. That was being in jail to me. I wasn't happy at all on the streets. That was the addict speaking.