Alan Cohen Quotes

Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, "Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world?" neither intolerable nor everlasting - if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination. Pain is either an evil to the body (then let the body say what it thinks of it!)-or to the soul. But it is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquility. . . .

There is really only one way to deal with Misery. Accept her presence. Like most experiences in life, we must acknowledge the passage gracefully and let her move through our lives because she brings with her a hidden gift.

Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.

I don't really feel any pressure. I can control only what I can control.

When there is pain, the animal instinct is 'fight or flight' (i.e., to either strike back or run away) - reflect instead. When you can calm yourself down, thinking about the dilemma that is causing you pain will bring you to a higher level and enlighten you, leading to progress.

The pain is always bringing me a lesson. If I listen to the lesson when the pain is manageable, the pain won't get gargantuan and flatten me entirely, because I will have received the message at the center. I receive it as gently as I can, because the cruelest thing that I do to myself is try to push myself through an experience.

Pain is inevitable, suffering is not.

I don't torture myself.

If you would only recognize that life is hard, things would be so much easier for you.

Acceptance of one's life has nothing to do with resignation; it does not mean running away from the struggle. On the contrary, it means accepting it as it comes, with all the handicaps of heredity, of suffering, of psychological complexes and injustices.

It's important to wallow and grieve when you have a health issue. I don't think you really get the best stuff out of life until you've had the worst stuff.

I get why we don't want to be in pain, but there's something very essential about what happens when we're in pain and some of the growth that can come from it if we stare at it straight in the face.

On those days when you don't want to get up, I think, I'm going to get through my entire practice without saying how tired I am or I try not to complain just because I was in a bad mood when I woke up. Even if it's not perfect and I slip up, I can catch myself and make myself of aware of where my mental space is at and move on.

If you start to dwell on your pain, the amount of pain will increase.

You can't avoid pain, but you can choose to overcome it.

Pain is important: how we evade it, how we succumb to it, how we deal with it, how we transcend it.

The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing comes in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm going to be pissed and miserable every time I have to food-shop, because my natural default-setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me, about my hungriness and my fatigue and my desire to just get home.

Character isn't inherited. One builds it daily by the way one thinks and acts, thought by thought, action by action. If one lets fear or hate or anger take possession of the mind, they become self-forged chains.

The secret of joy is the mastery of pain.

We cannot always control everything that happens to us in this life, but we can control how we respond.

It's necessary to use suffering. Otherwise, one is used by it.

It's your choice, what you do with the moment. If you're stuck in a traffic jam, you can get angry and honk your horn, or listen to Mozart. But when you have a very specific expectation of how things should be, then, of course, you end up hurting yourself.

You will know how to stop suffering as soon as suffering ceases to be valuable. If you are in pain, you are being led.

Remember that there are two things in this life that are never worth crying about: what can be cured and what cannot be cured.

Suffering is optional. You’re gonna have some pain but it doesn’t have to make you suffer.