Pema Chodron Quotes

Self-Realization Fellowship seemed like training. It was the training ground for finding a sense of peace in myself. Because that's my job. It's no one else's.

I think that all the spiritual training is just to be able to allow you to experience this from a slightly different perspective - one that's a little more stabilized.

Meditation means: put the mind aside and watch. The first step - LOVE YOURSELF - will help you tremendously. By loving yourself you will have destroyed much that society has implanted within you. You will have become freer from the society and its conditioning.

The way to develop inner peace through meditation begins with the recognition that the destroyer of inner peace is not some external foe, but is within us. Therefore, the solution is within us too. However, that inner change does not take place immediately in the way that we switch on a light, but takes weeks, months and years.

I meditate. I've been a meditator since, I think I was doing it unofficially before all my life and then began to formalize it somewhere around 14.

The mantra that you're given in Transcendental Meditation you keep to yourself. The reason being, true happiness is not out there, true happiness lies within.

It's been my experience that the longer I do yoga, the more I want to know, the more I am able to understand and the less judgmental I am.

Meditation is a lifelong process. Give it a try. As you get deeper and more disciplined into the process, you'll get deeper and more disciplined in your mind and life.

When you practice Buddhism, you have to always self-reflect, and you can't avoid your problems. That makes me understand human beings better. I feel that the more I do that in my own life, the more I can see how to play a character.

I just want to find some inner peace, and I think I'm getting there, slowly but surely.

Nobody can bring you peace but yourself.

I was constantly looking for things outside of myself to make me feel good, and I think now that feeling can come from the inside, and that's why I meditate now twice a day.

I feel like the sky in my mind is bigger when I meditate. It helps you fight the classic battles we're all fighting: trying to find love, trying to find satisfaction in your career.

Meditation is not a withdrawal from life. Meditation is a process of understanding oneself.

It is only when we begin to relax with ourselves that meditation becomes a transformative process. Only when we relate with ourselves without moralizing, without harshness, without deception, can we let go of harmful patterns. Without maitri (metta), renunciation of old habits becomes abusive. This is an important point.

When we practice metta, we open continuously to the truth of our actual experience, changing our relationship to life.

The goal of meditation is precisely to make your mind smooth and manageable so that it can be concentrated or relaxed at will; and especially to free it from the tyranny of mental afflictions and confusion

Meditation practice is a way of making friends with ourselves. Whether we are worthy or unworthy, that's not the point. It's developing a friendly attitude to ourselves, accepting the hidden neurosis coming through.

Ego says, "Once everything falls into place, I'll feel peace". Spirit says, "Find your peace, and then everything will fall into place".

What is important in meditation is the quality of the mind and the heart.It is not what you achieve, or what you say you attain, but rather the quality of a mind that is innocent and vulnerable.

Your love will deepen as your meditation deepens, and vice-versa: as your meditation blossoms, your love will also blossom.

In the beginning of my twenties, I started transcendental meditation. For years I did nothing else. Every holiday I went to courses. Meditation is a real simple instrument. You don't need a long beard or a sari. It's meant to bring you to yourself. It's as easy as that. And that's what it's all about, being alone with yourself every day, for 20 minutes in the morning and 20 minutes in the evening.

I think meditation has been the single biggest reason for whatever success Ive had

Meditation is enough. Everything else follows on its own.

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.