Pema Chodron Quotes

When you come from so many damaged places you don't ever want to spiral back there, so you gotta continue to check yourself.

If small things have the power to disturb you, then who you think you are is exactly that: small.

I'm grateful for my brokenness. I'm grateful for my humility.

Sometimes you have to lie to yourself to get through the criticism, and then you're in your closet crying. It's been like that for me a couple of times, but I only want to learn from those things.

A wounded healer, I think, is a lot more powerful than a healer that has not been wounded. In 'Weaker Girl,' I was coming from a wounded healer's perspective.

Sometimes, my weakness is where the strength really is, and it leads me to depend in the areas where I really should.

I can laugh at my own grief.

You think you're being broken but you're really being broken open...and that's where the healing happens, in those broken places...if you'll allow it.

I don't think you learn as much about yourself when you are moving forwards as when you have fallen backwards. That's when you really learn who you are. And reach for the things that have propelled you forward and made you a better person.

As a therapist, I know that when you're vulnerable, the best way to move on is to admit your vulnerability, don't beat yourself up for it, and try to find a way to analyze your vulnerability. Pull up your socks and try to do better for you and your family.

I am stronger than words and I am bigger than the box I'm in, and then I see her in the crowd and I fall apart -I am listening and I am listening because what I'm playing isn't something I'm thinking about, it's something I'm feeling all over.

Sometimes our strengths are also our weaknesses. Sometimes to be strong you have to first be weak. You have to share your burdens; you have to lean on other people while you face your problems and yourself.

One must not look inward too much, while the inside is yet tender. I do not wish to frighten myself until I can stand it.

By being vulnerable, either with yourself or in the presence of another person, that’s where all growth and ultimate well-being comes from.

When writing of oneself one should show no mercy. Yet why at the first attempt to discover one's own truth does all inner strength seem to melt away in floods of self-pity and tenderness and rising tears?

It is when you are asking about something that you realize you yourself have survived it, and so you must carry it, or fashion it into a thing that carries itself.

I'm a big believer in the idea that while we are the sum of our tears, we are also the product of our choices in how we deal with those tears.

It's a shallow life that doesn't give a person a few scars.

My demons, inner strengths and physical battles have guided me through life.

It's in the act of having to do things that you don't want to that you learn something about moving past the self. Past the ego.

I always told, Sandra Bullock was my student when she was younger, I always told her it's important that we hold on to our insecurity, the wisdom of insecurity.

I have ever been the queerest mixture of weakness and strength, and have paid heavily for the weakness.

I always felt like if I lived in true authentic self-expression and lived in service and in support of many other people, I would be exempt from having to deal with yet another crisis in my life. I was wrong.

The biggest breakthroughs in consciousness occur when things are difficult; when we have a choice to fall to the worst of ourselves or rise to the best of ourselves.

By the time you're 30, you know who you are inside. You learn to laugh at things you can't change; you learn to be yourself.