Pema Chodron Quotes

For some reason, I like to put myself in situations where I don't even know how I ended up there. I never want to be complacent or comfortable in a role.

After each experience, you grow up, you get enriched with something, and you don't know how you're going to be in six months, you don't know what you're going to want, what you're going to need.

Lack of comfort means we are on the threshold of new insights.

And if there's anything I do it's change and grow. I'm just a living being. Every year of my life I seem to learn that everything I know is wrong.

To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-man's-land, to experience each moment as completely new and fresh. To live is to be willing to die over and over again.

If we never take a risk, we'll never know the parts of ourselves that would have emerged if we had.

I believe that being an actress or being involved in a movie has to be a life experience, otherwise why go for it? I have to change me, and I have to learn things, and I have to push me and my limits. By acting, I find a freedom inside of a prison in a way.

Life is an aggregate of experience, which continually surprises us.

We must travel in the direction of our fear.

Getting to a place of comfort can be uncomfortable.

I kind of see myself as a cartoon that's on its way to becoming a real person that has to find that special amulet or mushroom to get to that next realm or level. I don't feel like anything is that tangible. It freaks me out, why I feel unhappy or conflicted and why that can change on a dime.

Change is rarely comfortable.

The spirit around leaving New York, for me, was that I just felt I needed to do something really outside of my comfort zone. And I really couldn't tell you at the time why I needed to do it. It wasn't like I was running from something dark; it was a desire to shake things up.

Sometimes you just have to let go of the old and trust that something better is going to take its place, even if it's scary to face change and the unknown.

So in my uncertainty, I went to graduate school and there it all happened.

A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find that after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.

Long years must pass before the truths we have made for ourselves become our very flesh.

Six months later I was in Paris. I was 16, and it all started to happen.

I've learned that for many people, change is uncomfortable. Maybe they want to go through it, and they can see the benefit of it, but at a gut level, change is uncomfortable.

In the past, I always used to be looking for answers. Today, I know there are only questions. So I just live.

Without change, something sleeps inside us, and seldom awakens. The sleeper must awaken.

Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.

I wake up every morning and I surprise myself. I wake up to a new me.

I believe if you are not rediscovering yourself and pushing boundaries, then you are not alive.

You go through pain. You feel uncomfortable, uncomfortable, uncomfortable until you change. I acquired a different outlook.