Pema Chodron Love Quotes

Everybody loves something, even if it's only tortillas.

Be kinder to yourself. And then let your kindness flood the world.

PATIENCE is the antidote to anger, a way to learn to love and care for whatever we meet on the path.

We can't escape from our problems, but we can learn to live with them in a way that is peaceful and joyful.

In the present moment we can always realize that the ground is to develop loving-kindness toward ourselves. As adults, we can begin to cultivate a sense of loving-kindness for ourselves—by ourselves, for ourselves. The whole process of meditation is one of creating that good ground, that cradle of loving-kindness where we actually are nurtured. What’s being nurtured is our confidence in our own wisdom, our own health, and our own courage, our own goodheartedness. We develop some sense that the way we are—the kind of personality that we have and the way we express life—is good, and that by being who we are completely and by totally accepting that and having respect for ourselves, we are standing on the ground of warriorship. " Pema Chodron, Awakening Loving-Kindness, pages 144–145

Even if you were the Buddha himself, if you were a fully enlightened person, you would experience death, illness, aging, and sorrow at losing what you love. All of these things would happen to you. If you got burned or cut, it would hurt.

The path of the bodhisattva-warrior WHEREVER we are, we can train as a warrior. The practices of meditation, loving-kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity are our tools. With the help of these practices, we can uncover the soft spot of bodhichitta, the tenderness of the awakened heart.

One afternoon I opened an email from her that included a passage from the work of Pema Chodron, a Buddhist teacher and writer whom I had long admired. "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.

If you can practice patience in the traffic jam with a sense of humor approach or whatever approach you want to use, you are training for really major difficulties in your life. So, it sounds silly, but actually, it’s true. If you’re sowing seeds of aggression in the traffic jam, then you’re actually perfecting the aggression habit. And if you’re using your sense of humor and your loving-kindness or whatever it is you do, then you’re sowing those kinds of seeds and strengthening those kinds of mental habits; you’re imprinting those kind of things in your unconscious. So, the choice is really ours every time we’re in a traffic jam.

If you can practice patience in the traffic jam with a sense of humor approach or whatever approach you want to use, you are training for really major difficulties in your life. So, it sounds silly, but actually, it’s true. If you’re sowing seeds of aggression in the traffic jam, then you’re actually perfecting the aggression habit. And if you’re using your sense of humor and your loving-kindness or whatever it is you do, then you’re sowing those kinds of seeds and strengthening those kinds of mental habits; you’re imprinting those kind of things in your unconscious. So, the choice is really ours every time we’re in a traffic jam. - Pema Chodron

But loving-kindness, or maitri, toward ourselves doesn’t mean getting rid of anything. Maitri means that we can still be crazy after all these years. We can still be angry after all these years. We can still be timid or jealous or full of feelings of unworthiness. The point is not to try to change ourselves. Meditation practice isn’t about trying to throw ourselves away and become something better. It’s about befriending who we are already. The ground of practice is you or me or whoever we are right now, just as we are. That’s the ground, that’s what we study, that’s what we come to know with tremendous curiosity and interest.

The path of the bodhisattva-warrior WHEREVER we are, we can train as a warrior. The practices of meditation, loving-kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity are our tools.

Without loving-kindness for ourselves it is difficult, if not impossible, to genuinely feel it for others.