Pema Chodron Quotes

When our TV screens are filled with heartbreaking images of suffering, we have to dig deep inside ourselves in order to keep going.

Yes, hardships come. But I see in my life and in the lives of others how often something that does not have to be held as a hardship is dealt with by the mind as though it is.

When something happens to you, suffering doesn't begin. Suffering begins at the instant you label a bad thing - as something that is wrong.

The state of minds vary according to the angle under which one examines them.

I don't need to manufacture trauma in my life to be creative. I have a big enough reservoir of sadness or emotional trauma to last me.

People play with pain all the time.

Dancers dance through their pain I shrink from mine.

Experience is valuable only when it has brought suffering and when the suffering has left its mark upon both body and mind.

Sanity brings pain but madness is a vile thing.

I think we start suffering as soon as we come out of the womb. I think that people tend to stereotype. When they think of suffering, they think of abuse - physical abuse, emotional abuse, poverty, that kind of thing. There's different levels of suffering. I don't think that it has to do with how much money you have - if you were raised in the ghetto or the Hamptons. For me it's more about perception: self-perception and how you perceive the world.

By then Esthappen and Rahel had learned that the world had other ways of breaking men. They were already familiar with the smell. Sicksweet. Like old roses on a breeze.

The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it.

Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.

He knows that you have to laugh at the things that hurt you just to keep yourself in balance, just to keep the world from running you plumb crazy.

I don't remember the first half of my life. All I say is a happy childhood is the worst possible preparation for life.

While books provided me with some escape from the mental and physical horrors of my early life, they were unreliable. Many times the protagonists suffered terribly and then died at the end.

A lot of times when you go through a very traumatic situation and it's emotionally difficult to deal with you come back spiritually stronger. It changes you in a way.

What makes most of us who we are most of all is not our minds and not our bodies and not what happens to us, but how we respond to what happens to us.

Nothing is miserable unless you think it is so.

Nothing uniquely bad has happened to me in my personal life, but all the regular little bad things have accumulated to make me a neurotic person. And these adventures are my way of trying to make sense of that.

I've had a tremendous problem with depression in my life. I'd rather not talk about it, because it's over. But depression is real.

It is a queer thing, but imaginary troubles are harder to bear than actual ones.

It's kind of a mystery to me, as far as my own life experiences and what I've witnessed - why some people can just move on through traumatic experiences, in childhood particularly, and why other people are just paralyzed by it. I just don't know how and why that is.

No day-to-day mishaps or indignities can really compromise your sense of self after you've survived a deep tragedy.

When I listen to these women, it makes what I thought were my hard knocks feel like little nudges.