Pema Chodron Quotes

It's those changes in latitudes, changes in attitudes nothing remains quite the same. With all of our running and all of our cunning, if we couldn't laugh, we would all go insane.

Crisis and pressure help foster change - that's why I'm not so pessimistic towards crises.

I love change, I need it.

Being a good steward of your pain. . . . It involves being alive to your life. It involves taking the risk of being open, of reaching out, of keeping in touch with the pain as well as the joy of what happens because at no time more than at a painful time do we live out of the depths of who we are instead of out of the shallows.

And loss of control is always the source of fear. It is also, however, always the source of change.

We have hopes and make plans, and if they are dashed or waylaid, we naturally rationalize and redraw the map to locate ourselves anew. Or else we brood and too firmly root. Very few can step forward again and again in what amounts to veritable leaps into the void, where there are no ready holds, where little is familiar, where you get constantly stuck in the thickets of your uncertainties and fears.

Resistance to change is proportional to how much the future might be altered by any given act.

If it (the good circumstances) changes will you be able to keep onto your happiness just as much? Because if not then your happiness is really built on sand.

Within chaos lies opportunity.

Bottom line is, even if you see 'em coming, you're not ready for the big moments. No one asks for their life to change, not really. But it does. So what are we, helpless? Puppets? No. The big moments are gonna come. You can't help that. It's what you do afterwards that counts. That's when you find out who you are.

There is no growth without change, no change without fear or loss and no loss without pain.

I thought: to be tough is to be fragile; to be tender is to be truly fierce.

A warrior is not about perfection or victory or invulnerability. He's about absolute vulnerability.

When things fall apart in your life, you feel as if your whole world is crumbling. But actually it’s your fixed identity that’s crumbling. And as Chögyam Trungpa used to tell us, that’s cause for celebration.

I think life goes through a cycle of losing and refinding yourself all the time. Everyone has disappointments all the time, some of them pretty small, some of them pretty big.

I think at times of significant stress people are going to be looking for something and they don't always know exactly what it is that they're looking for and they may opt for change even if they're not entirely confident what that change will bring.

Falling is scary but good practice for life. We must fall. In love. Out of love. Into new experiences. Out of old habits. Deeper and further into ourselves. We must fall, life is falling over forward. The only choice we have is how we let go.

You spend so much time, so much effort, trying to hold yourself together. And then everything falls apart anyway.

Wanting to change, to improve, a person's situation means offering him, for difficulties in which he is practiced and experienced, other difficulties that will find him perhaps even more bewildered.

Sometimes there is no way to hold your life together. Sometimes things just have to fall apart.

Even when change is elective, it will disorient you. You may go through anxiety. You will miss aspects of your former life. It doesn't matter. The trick is to know in advance of making any big change that you're going to be thrown off your feet by it. So you prepare for this inevitable disorientation and steady yourself to get through it. Then you take the challenge, make the change, and achieve your dream.

Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing.

With each passage of human growth we must shed a protective structure . We are left exposed and vulnerable - but also yeasty and embryonic again, capable of stretching in ways we hadn't known before.

The only thing I do know is that from chaos comes opportunity.

It is in the turmoil of chaos that we discover what, if anything, we are.