Pema Chodron Quotes

Change is possible, but it must start with self-acceptance.

I am still learning every day not to watch other people's careers and compare.

Buddhism has turned me on to my humanness, and is challenging my humanness so that I can become more human.

You change your life by changing your heart.

Solitude is the furnace of transformation. Without solitude we remain victims of our society and continue to be entangled in the illusions of the false self.

Self-sabotage is the proverbial hammer over the head that finally wakes us up, demanding that we pay attention. For most of us, it takes something devastating to crack us open, to get us out of our minds and into our hearts.

Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.

Compare yourself to yourself and say, 'How can I be better? How can I be the real me?'

Anyway, I believe you don't fix the inside by putting something on the outside.

You may not seem able to change some outer circumstances but you can start by changing your inner experience of life and yourself.

The message of transformation and how we all can live from our heart, not just from our head, was a very important message for me to learn in my own life.

Sobriety has opened my mind and unlocked parts of me that I didn't even realize existed.

Self-criticism is an art not many are qualified to practice.

Awakening self-compassion is often the greatest challenge people face on the spiritual path.

We give it up and just look directly with compassion and humor at who we are. Then loneliness is no threat and heartache, no punishment.

You accept certain unlovely things about yourself and manage to live with them. The atonement for such an acceptance is that you make allowances for others - that you cleanse yourself of the sin of self-righteousness.

What I know for sure is that your life is a multipart series of all your experiences- and each experience is created by your thoughts, intentions, and actions to teach you what you need to know. Your life is a journey of learning to love yourself first and then extending that love to others in every encounter.

I see my life as an unfolding set of opportunities to awaken.

In deep self acceptance, grows a compassionate understanding.

Our wisdom is all mixed up with what we call our neurosis. Our brilliance, our juiciness, our spiciness, is all mixed up with our craziness and our confusion, and therefore it doesn’t do any good to try to get rid of our so-called negative aspects, because in that process we also get rid of our basic wonderfulness. We can lead our life so as to become more awake to who we are and what we’re doing rather than trying to improve or change or get rid of who we are or what we’re doing. The key is to wake up, to become more alert, more inquisitive and curious about ourselves.

It's important to stay true to yourself. You have to know your weaknesses and recruit support when and where you need it.

it takes a lot of rehearsal to become yourself.

It is painful to face the self we know we have never had the integrity to honor and assert.

We can drop the fundamental hope that there is a better "me" who one day will emerge. We can't just jump over ourselves as if we were not there.

We must be willing to be completely ordinary people, which means accepting ourselves as we are without trying to become greater, purer, more spiritual, more insightful. If we can accept our imperfections as they are, quite ordinarily, then we can use them as part of the path. But if we try to get rid of our imperfections, then they will be enemies, obstacles on the road to our ‘self-improvement’.