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If Your Mind Is Expansive And Unfettered, You Will Find Yourself In A More Accommodating World, A Place That's Endlessly Interesting And Alive. That Quality Isn't Inherent In The Place But In Your State Of Mind.

-Pema Chodron

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If Your Mind Is

Pema Chodron

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If Your Mind Is Expansive And Unfettered, You Will Find Yourself In A More Accommodating World, A Place That's Endlessly Interesting And Alive. That Quality Isn't Inherent In The Place But In Your State Of Mind.

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Topic

Finding Yourself

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Clarity And Decisiveness Come From The Willingness To Slow Down, To Listen To And Look At What’s Happening.

Anything We Experience, No Matter How Challenging, Can Become An Open Pathway To Awakening.

We Are Not Human Beings Having A Spiritual Experience, We Are Spiritual Beings Having A Human Experience And Infinite Love Is The Only Truth; Everything Else Is An Illusion.

Positive Thinking

Rejoicing In The Good Fortune Of Others Is A Practice That Can Help Us When We Feel Emotionally Shut Down And Unable To Connect With Others. Rejoicing Generates Good Will.

You See, There Really Is No Separation Between You And Everyone Else.

Each Time You Stay Present With Fear And Uncertainty, You're Letting Go Of A Habitual Way Of Finding Security And Comfort.

Life Is Glorious, But Life Is Also Wretched. It Is Both...life Is Glorious, But Life Is Also Wretched. It Is Both.

Nothing In Its Essence Is One Way Or The Other.

If You’re Aggressive In Your Dealings, That’s How You’ll Be Regarded In The World. You Might Smile And Give Generously, But If You Frequently Explode In Anger, People Never Feel Comfortable In Your Presence And You’ll Never Have Peace Of Mind.

If We Learn To Open Our Hearts, Anyone, Including The People Who Drive Us Crazy, Can Be Our Teacher.

Inspirational Love

Unconditional Good Heart Toward Others Is Not Even A Possibility Unless We Attend To Our Own Demons.

To Stay With That Shakiness-to Stay With A Broken Heart, With A Rumbling Stomach, With The Feeling Of Hopelessness And Wanting To Get Revenge-that Is The Path Of True Awakening. Sticking With That Uncertainty, Getting The Knack Of Relaxing In The Midst Of Chaos, Learning Not To Panic-this Is The Spiritual Path.

People Get Into A Heavy-duty Sin And Guilt Trip, Feeling That If Things Are Going Wrong, That Means That They Did Something Bad And They Are Being Punished. That's Not The Idea At All. The Idea Of Karma Is That You Continually Get The Teachings That You Need To Open Your Heart. To The Degree That You Didn't Understand In The Past How To Stop Protecting Your Soft Spot, How To Stop Armoring Your Heart, You're Given This Gift Of Teachings In The Form Of Your Life, To Give You Everything You Need To Open Further.

Most Of Us Do Not Take These Situations As Teachings. We Automatically Hate Them. We Run Like Crazy. We Use All Kinds Of Ways To Escape - All Addictions Stem From This Moment When We Meet Our Edge And We Just Can't Stand It. We Feel We Have To Soften It, Pad It With Something, And We Become Addicted To Whatever It Is That Seems To Ease The Pain.

Gloriousness And Wretchedness Need Each Other. One Inspires Us, The Other Softens Us.

As Buddhism Moved To The West, One Of The Big Characteristics Was The Strong Place Of Women. That Didn't Exist In The Countries Of Origin. It's Just A Sign Of Our Culture.

I Have All The Support I Need To Simply Relax And Be With The Transitional, In-process Quality Of My Life. I Have All I Need To Engage In The Process Of Awakening.

If Right Now Our Emotional Reaction To Seeing A Certain Person Or Hearing Certain News Is To Fly Into A Rage Or To Get Despondent Or Something Equally Extreme, It's Because We Have Been Cultivating That Particular Habit For A Very Long Time.

We Are Not Given Any Promises That, Because Of Our Noble Intentions, Everything Will Be Okay. We Learn That What Truly Heals Is Gratitude And Tenderness. We [need] To Transform Our Minds And Actions For The Sake Of Other People And For The Future Of The World.

When You Begin To Touch Your Heart Or Let Your Heart Be Touched, You Begin To Discover That It's Bottomless.

Opening Our Hearts

The Sad Part Is That All We're Trying To Do Is Not Feel That Underlying Uneasiness. The Sadder Part Is That We Proceed In Such A Way That The Uneasiness Only Gets Worse. The Message Here Is That The Only Way To Ease Our Pain Is To Experience It Fully. Learn To Stay. Learn To Stay With Uneasiness, Learn To Stay With The Tightening, Learn To Stay With The Itch And Urge Of Shenpa, So That The Habitual Chain Reaction Doesn't Continue To Rule Our Lives, And The Patterns That We Consider Unhelpful Don't Keep Getting Stronger As The Days And Months And Years Go By.

Cool Loneliness Allows Us To Look Honestly And Without Aggressionat Our Own Minds. We Can Gradually Drop Our Ideals Of Who We Think Weought To Be, Or Who We Think We Want To Be, Or Who We Think Other Peoplethink We Want To Be Or Ought To Be. We Give It Up And Just Look Directlywith Compassion And Humor At Who We Are. Then Loneliness Is No Threat Andheartache, No Punishment.

One Can Appreciate & Celebrate Each Moment — There’s Nothing More Sacred. There’s Nothing More Vast Or Absolute. In Fact, There’s Nothing More!

The Best Spiritual Instruction Is When You Wake Up In The Morning And Say, 'i Wonder What's Going To Happen Today.' And Then Carry That Kind Of Curiosity Through Your Life.

According To The Buddhist Belief, You Can Go On And On Indefinitely, So You See Your Life As Just A Brief Moment In Time.

There Comes A Time When The Bubble Of Ego Is Popped And You Can’t Get The Ground Back For An Extended Period Of Time. Those Times, When You Absolutely Cannot Get It Back Together, Are The Most Rich And Powerful Times In Our Lives.

Tonglen Dissolves Your Solid Sense Of "i'm The Wise Person, I'm Going To Help This Poor, Unfortunate Loser."

All Situations Teach You, And Often It's The Tough Ones That Teach You Best.

Meditation Isn't Really About Getting Rid Of Thoughts, It's About Changing The Pattern Of Grasping On To Things, Which In Our Everyday Experience Is Our Thoughts.

The Ego Seeks To Divide And Separate. Spirit Seeks To Unify And Heal.

Being Satisfied With What We Already Have Is A Magical Golden Key To Being Alive In A Full, Unrestricted, And Inspired Way.

Compassionate Action Involves Working With Ourselves As Much As Working With Others.

Working With Others

The First Noble Truth Of The Buddha Is That When We Feel Suffering, It Doesn’t Mean That Something Is Wrong. What A Relief. Finally Somebody Told The Truth. Suffering Is Part Of Life, And We Don’t Have To Feel It’s Happening Because We Personally Made The Wrong Move. In Reality, However, When We Feel Suffering, We Think That Something Is Wrong. As Long As We’re Addicted To Hope, We Feel That We Can Tone Our Experience Down Or Liven It Up Or Change It Somehow, And We Continue To Suffer A Lot.

Sitting Meditation Gives Us A Way To Move Closer To Our Thoughts And Emotions And To Get In Touch With Our Bodies.

If We Pause And Breathe In And Out, Then We Can Have The Experience Of Timeless Presence, Of The Inexpressible Wisdom And Goodness Of Our Own Minds. We Can Look At The World With Fresh Eyes And Hear Things With Fresh Ears.

It's Not A Terrible Thing That We Feel Fear When Faced With The Unknown. It Is Part Of Being Alive, Something We All Share.

The Central Question Of A Warrior's Training Is Not How We Avoid Uncertainty And Fear But How We Relate To Discomfort.

Holding On To Anything Blocks Wisdom.

It Becomes Increasingly Clear That We Won’t Be Free Of Self-destructive Patterns Unless We Develop A Compassionate Understanding Of What They Are.

Although It Is Embarrassing And Painful, It Is Very Healing To Stop Hiding From Yourself. It Is Healing To Know All The Ways That You’re Sneaky, All The Ways That You Hide Out, All The Ways That You Shut Down, Deny, Close Off, Criticize People, All Your Weird Little Ways. You Can Know All Of That With Some Sense Of Humor And Kindness. By Knowing Yourself, You’re Coming To Know Humanness Altogether. We Are All Up Against These Things. We Are All In This Together.

Awareness Is The Key. Do We See The Stories That We're Telling Ourselves And Question Their Validity?

The Trick Is To Keep Exploring And Not Bail Out, Even When We Find Out That Something Is Not What We Thought.

When We Scratch The Wound And Give Into Our Addictions We Do Not Allow The Wound To Heal.

When We Are Willing To Stay Even A Moment With Uncomfortable Energy, We Gradually Learn Not To Fear It.

If We're Willing To Give Up Hope That Insecurity And Pain Can Be Eliminated, Then We Can Have The Courage To Relax With The Groundlessness Of Our Situation. This Is The First Step On The Path.

Times Are Difficult Globally; Awakening Is No Longer A Luxury Or An Ideal. It’s Becoming Critical. We Don’t Need To Add More Depression, More Discouragement, Or More Anger To What’s Already Here. It’s Becoming Essential That We Learn How To Relate Sanely With Difficult Times. The Earth Seems To Be Beseeching Us To Connect With Joy And Discover Our Innermost Essence. This Is The Best Way That We Can Benefit Others.

When We Resist Change, It’s Called Suffering. But When We Can Completely Let Go And Not Struggle Against It, When We Can Embrace The Groundlessness Of Our Situation And Relax Into It’s Dynamic Quality, That’s Called Enlightenment

A Heartfelt Sense Of Aspiring Cuts Through Negativity About Yourself; It Cuts Through The Heavy Trips You Lay On Yourself.

We Could Learn To Stop When The Sun Goes Down And When The Sun Comes Up. We Could Learn To Listen To The Wind; We Could Learn To Notice That It's Raining Or Snowing Or Hailing Or Calm. We Could Reconnect With The Weather That Is Ourselves, And We Could Realize That It's Sad. The Sadder It Is, And The Vaster It Is, The More Our Heart Opens. We Can Stop Thinking That Good Practice Is When It's Smooth And Calm, And Bad Practice Is When It's Rough And Dark. If We Can Hold It All In Our Hearts, Then We Can Make A Proper Cup Of Tea.

Everything Is Fresh, The Essence Of Realization.

Allow Situations In Your Life To Become Your Teacher.

Until We Stop Clinging To The Concept Of Good And Evil, The World Will Continue To Manifest As Friendly Goddesses And Harmful Demons.

Being Preoccupied With Our Self-image Is Like Being Deaf And Blind. It's Like Standing In The Middle Of A Vast Field Of Wildflowers With A Black Hood Over Our Heads. It's Like Coming Upon A Tree Of Singing Birds While Wearing Earplugs.

To Cultivate Equanimity We Practice Catching Ourselves When We Feel Attraction Or Aversion, Before It Hardens Into Grasping Or Negativity.

We Feel That We Have To Be Right So That We Can Feel Good. We Don’t Want To Be Wrong Because Then We’ll Feel Bad. But We Could Be More Compassionate Toward All These Parts Of Ourselves. The Whole Right And Wrong Business Closes Us Down And Makes Our World Smaller. Wanting Situations And Relationships To Be Solid, Permanent, And Graspable Obscures The Pith Of The Matter, Which Is That Things Are Fundamentally Groundless.

In Meditation, You Learn How To Get Out Of Your Own Way Long Enough For There To Be Room For Your Wisdom To Manifest

It's A Transformative Experience To Simply Pause Instead Of Immediately Filling Up Space.

When Resistance Is Gone, The Demons Are Gone.

The Approach Is That The Best Way To Use Unwanted Circumstances On The Path Of Enlightenment Is Not To Resist But To Lean Into Them.

Ordinarily We Are Swept Away By Habitual Momentum And Don't Interrupt Our Patterns Slightly. When We Feel Betrayed Or Disappointed, Does It Occur To Us To Practice?

Learning How To Be Kind To Ourselves, Learning How To Respect Ourselves, Is Important. The Reason It's Important Is That, Fundamentally, When We Look Into Our Own Hearts And Begin To Discover What Is Confused And What Is Brilliant, What Is Bitter And What Is Sweet, It Isn't Just Ourselves That We're Discovering. We're Discovering The Universe.

We Can Put Our Whole Heart Into Whatever We Do; But If We Freeze Our Attitude Into For Or Against, We're Setting Ourselves Up For Stress. Instead, We Could Just Go Forward With Curiosity, Wondering Where This Experiment Will Lead. This Kind Of Open-ended Inquisitiveness Captures The Spirit Of Enthusiasm, Or Heroic Perseverance.

It Is Possible To Move Through The Drama Of Our Lives Without Believing So Earnestly In The Character That We Play. That We Take Ourselves So Seriously, That We Are So Absurdly Important In Our Own Minds, Is A Problem For Us. We Feel Justified In Being Annoyed With Everything. We Feel Justified In Denigrating Ourselves Or In Feeling That We Are More Clever Than Other People. Self-importance Hurts Us, Limiting Us To The Narrow World Of Our Likes And Dislikes. We End Up Bored To Death With Ourselves And Our World. We End Up Never Satisfied.

Awareness Is The Key. Do We See The Stories That We're Telling Ourselves And Question Their Validity? When We Are Distracted By Strong Emotion, Do We Remember That It Is Our Path? Can We Feel The Emotion And Breathe It Into Our Hearts For Ourselves And Everyone Else? If We Can Remember To Experiment Like This Even Occasionally, We Are Training As A Warrior. And When We Can't Practice When Distracted But Know We Can't, We Are Still Training Well. Never Underestimate The Power Of Compassionately Recognizing What's Going On.

Mindfulness Is Loving All The Details Of Our Lives, And Awareness Is The Natural Thing That Happens: Life Begins To Open Up, And You Realize That You're Always Standing At The Center Of The World.

For One Day, Or For One Day For A Week, Refrain From Something You Habitually Do To Run Away, To Escape. Pick Something Concrete, Such As Overeating Or Excessive Sleeping Or Overworking Or Spending Too Much Time Texting Or Checking E-mails. Make A Commitment To Yourself To Gently And Compassionately Work With Refraining From This Habit For This One Day. Really Commit To It. Do This With The Intention That It Will Put You In Touch With The Underlying Anxiety Or Uncertainty That You've Been Avoiding. Do It And See What You Discover.

What If Rather Than Being Disheartened By The Ambiguity, The Uncertainty Of Life, We Accepted It And Relaxed Into It?

Uncertainty Of Life

When We Sit Down To Meditate, We Connect With Something Unconditional - A State Of Mind, A Basic Environment That Does Not Grasp Or Reject Anything. Meditation Is Probably The Only Activity That Doesn't Add Anything To The Picture. Everything Is Allowed To Come And Go Without Further Embellishment. Meditation Is A Totally Nonviolent, Non Aggressive Occupation. Not Filling The Space, Allowing For The Possibility Of Connecting With Unconditional Openness - This Provides The Basis For Real Change.

Some Of Us Can Accept Others Right Where They Are A Lot More Easily Than We Can Accept Ourselves. We Feel That Compassion Is Reserved For Someone Else, And It Never Occurs To Us To Feel It For Ourselves. My Experience Is That By Practicing Without 'shoulds,' We Gradually Discover Our Wakefulness And Our Confidence. Gradually, Without Any Agenda Except To Be Honest And Kind, We Assume Responsibility For Being Here In This Unpredictable World, In This Unique Moment, In This Precious Human Body.

Next, Feel Your Heart, Literally Placing Your Hand On Your Chest If You Find That Helpful. This Is A Way Of Accepting Yourself Just As You Are In That Moment, A Way Of Saying, "this Is My Experience Right Now, And It's Okay." Then Go Into The Next Moment Without Any Agenda.

Compassion Is Not A Relationship Between The Healer And The Wounded. It's A Relationship Between Equals. Only When We Know Our Own Darkness Well Can We Be Present With The Darkness Of Others. Compassion Becomes Real When We Recognize Our Shared Humanity.

As Human Beings, Not Only Do We Seek Resolution, But We Also Feel That We Deserve Resolution. However, Not Only Do We Not Deserve Resolution, We Suffer From Resolution. We Don't Deserve Resolution; We Deserve Something Better Than That. We Deserve Our Birthright, Which Is The Middle Way, An Open State Of Mind That Can Relax With Paradox And Ambiguity.

People Get Into A Heavy-duty Sin And Guilt Trip, Feeling That If Things Are Going Wrong, That Means That They Did Something Bad And They Are Being Punished. That's Not The Idea At All.

If We Want There To Be Peace In The World, We Have To Be Brave Enough To Soften What Is Rigid In Our Hearts, To Find The Soft Spot And Stay With It. We Have To Have That Kind Of Courage And Take That Kind Of Responsibility. That’s The True Practice Of Peace.

To Live Is To Be Willing To Die Over And Over Again.

Peace Isn’t An Experience Free Of Challenges, Free Of Rough And Smooth, It’s An Experience That’s Expansive Enough To Include All That Arises Without Feeling Threatened.

One Very Powerful And Effective Way To Work With This Tendency To Push Away Pain And Hold On To Pleasure Is The Practice Of Tonglen.  in Tonglen Practice, When We See Or Feel Suffering, We  breathe In With The Notion Of Completely Feeling It, Accepting It, And Owning It.

If Seeing That Other Person's Pain Brings Up Your Fear Or Anger Or Confusion (which Often Happens), Just Start Doing Tonglen For Yourself And All The Other People Who Are Stuck In The Very Same Way.

That Nothing Is Static Or Fixed, That All Is Fleeting And Impermanent, Is The First Mark Of Existence. It Is The Ordinary State Of Affairs. Everything Is In Process. Everything - Every Tree, Every Blade Of Grass, All The Animals, Insects, Human Beings, Buildings, The Animate And The Inanimate - Is Always Changing, Moment To Moment.

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.

Never Underestimate The Desire To Bolt.

Never Underestimate

When We Start Out On A Spiritual Path We Often Have Ideals We Think We're Supposed To Live Up To. We Feel We're Supposed To Be Better Than We Are In Some Way. But With This Practice You Take Yourself Completely As You Are. Then Ironically, Taking In Pain - Breathing It In For Yourself And All Others In The Same Boat As You Are Heightens Your Awareness Of Exactly Where You're Stuck.

So Even If The Hot Loneliness Is There, And For 1.6 Seconds We Sit With That Restlessness When Yesterday We Couldn't Sit For Even One, That's The Journey Of The Warrior. (68)

That Nothing Is Static Or Fixed, That All Is Fleeting And Impermanent, Is The First Mark Of Existence. Everything Is In Process.

Holding On To Beliefs Limits Our Experience Of Life. That Doesn't Mean That Beliefs Or Ideas Or Thinking Is A Problem; The Stubborn Attitude Of Having To Have Things Be A Particular Way, Grasping On To Our Beliefs And Thoughts, All These Cause The Problems. To Put It Simply, Using Your Belief System This Way Creates A Situation In Which You Choose To Be Blind Instead Of Being Able To See, To Be Deaf Instead Of Being Able To Hear, To Be Dead Rather Than Alive, Asleep Rather Than Awake.

As Our Kindness For Ourselves Grows, So Does Our Kindness For Other People.

We're Not Trying To Be Something We Aren't; Rather, We're Reconnecting With Who We Are.

Pain Is Not A Punishment; Pleasure Is Not A Reward.

We're Afraid That This Anger Or Sorrow Or Loneliness Is Going To Last Forever... Instead, Acting It Out Is What Makes It Last.

The Difference Between Theism And Nontheism Is Not Whether One Does Or Does Not Believe In God. . . Theism Is A Deep-seated Conviction That There's Some Hand To Hold: If We Just Do The Right Things, Someone Will Appreciate Us And Take Care Of Us. . . Nontheism Is Relaxing With The Ambiguity And Uncertainty Of The Present Moment Without Reaching For Anything To Protect Ourselves.

On The Journey Of The Warrior-bodhisattva, The Path Goes Down, Not Up, As If The Mountain Pointed Toward The Earth Instead Of The Sky. Instead Of Transcending The Suffering Of All Creatures, We Move Toward Turbulence And Doubt However We Can. We Explore The Reality And Unpredictability Of Insecurity And Pain, And We Try Not To Push It Away. If It Takes Years, If It Takes Lifetimes, We Let It Be As It Is. At Our Own Pace, Without Speed Or Aggression, We Move Down And Down And Down. With Us Move Millions Of Others, Companions In Awakening From Fear.

This Is The Tendency Of All Living Things: To Avoid Pain And To Cling To Pleasure.

If You See A Homeless Person On The Street, And They Need Food, Housing, Medical Attention - If You Can Give That, Do It. But At The Same Time, Work With Tonglen, Because That Is How You Start Dissolving The Barrier Between You And Them.

This Very Moment Is The Perfect Teacher, And, Lucky For Us, It's With Us Wherever We Go.

As We Practice, We Begin To Know The Difference Between Our Fantasy And Reality.

Over Time, As The Thinking Mind Begins To Settle [through The Practice Of Meditation], We’ll Start To See Our Patterns And Habits Far More Clearly. Sometimes This Can Be A Painful Experience. I Can’t Overestimate The Importance Of Accepting Ourselves Exactly As We Are Right Now, Not As We Wish We Were Or Think We Ought To Be. By Cultivating Nonjudgmental Openness To Ourselves And To Whatever Arises, To Our Surprise And Delight We Will Find Ourselves Genuinely Welcoming The Never-pin-downable Quality Of Life, Experiencing It As A Friend, A Teacher, And A Support, And No Longer As An Enemy.

Painful Experiences

The More We Witness Our Emotional Reactions And Understand How They Work, The Easier It Is To Refrain.

Welcome The Present Moment As If You Had Invited It. It Is All We Ever Have, So We Night As Well Work With It Rather Than Struggling Against It. We Might As Well Make It Our Friend And Teacher Rather Than Our Enemy.

Instead Of Making Others Right Or Wrong, Or Bottling Up Right And Wrong In Ourselves, There's A Middle Way, A Very Powerful Middle Way...... Could We Have No Agenda When We Walk Into A Room With Another Person, Not Know What To Say, Not Make That Person Wrong Or Right? Could We See, Hear, Feel Other People As They Really Are? It Is Powerful To Practice This Way..... True Communication Can Happen Only In That Open Space.

The Teacher Will Never Give Up On The Student No Matter How Mixed Up He Or She Might Be

Letting There Be Room For Not Knowing Is The Most Important Thing Of All. When There's A Big Disappointment, We Don't Know If That's The End Of The Story. It May Just Be The Beginning Of A Great Adventure. Life Is Like That. We Don't Know Anything. We Call Something Bad; We Call It Good. But Really We Just Don't Know.

If You Work With Your Mind, That Will Alleviate All The Suffering That Seems To Come From The Outside.

Compassion Isn't Some Kind Of Self-improvement Project Or Ideal That We're Trying To Live Up To. Having Compassion Starts And Ends With Having Compassion For All Those Unwanted Parts Of Ourselves, All Those Imperfections That We Don't Even Want To Look At.

The Painful Thing Is That When We Buy Into Disapproval,we Are Practicing Disapproval. When We Buy Into Harshness,we Are Practicing Harshness.

We Are Undoing A Pattern... It's The Human Pattern: We Project Onto The World A Zillion Possibilities Of Attaining Resolution.

Whatever Is Happening Is The Path To Enlightenment.

Path To Enlightenment

Compassion Starts With Making Friends With Ourselves.

In The Most Ordinary Terms, Egolessness Is A Flexible Identity. It Manifests As Inquisitiveness , As Adaptability, As Humor, As Playfulness. It Is Our Capacity To Relax With Not Knowing, Not Figuring Everything Out, With Not Being At All Sure Who We Are, Or Who Anyone Else Is, Either.

When Things Are Shaky And Nothing Is Working, We Might Realize That We Are On The Verge Of Something.

Tonglen Practice Begins To Dissolve The Illusion That Each Of Us Is Alone With This Personal Suffering That No One Else Can Understand.

Resisting What Is Happening Is A Major Cause Of Suffering.

Rather Than Becoming More Relaxed, You Start Pulling Down The Shades And Locking The Door. When You Do Go Out, You Find The Experience More And More Unsettling And Disagreeable. You Become Touchier, More Fearful, More Irritable Than Ever. The More You Try To Get It Your Way, The Less You Feel At Home.

Since Death Is Certain And The Time Of Death Is Uncertain, What Is The Most Important Thing?

When We Protect Ourselves So We Won't Feel Pain, That Protection Becomes Like Armor, Like Armor That Imprisons The Softness Of Of The Heart.

The Buddha Taught That We're Not Actually In Control, Which Is A Pretty Scary Idea. But When You Let Things Be As They Are, You Will Be A Much Happier, More Balanced, Compassionate Person.

Feel The Wounded Heart That's Underneath The Addiction, Self-loathing, Or Anger.

Compassion Is Not A Relationship Between The Healer And The Wounded. It’s A Relationship Between Equals.

Instead Of Asking Ourselves, 'how Can I Find Security And Happiness?' We Could Ask Ourselves, 'can I Touch The Center Of My Pain? Can I Sit With Suffering, Both Yours And Mine, Without Trying To Make It Go Away? Can I Stay Present To The Ache Of Loss Or Disgrace-disapp Ointment In All Its Many Forms-and Let It Open Me?' This Is The Trick.

Softening What Is Rigid In Our Hearts.

What You Do For Yourself, Any Gesture Of Kindness, Any Gesture Of Gentleness, Any Gesture Of Honesty And Clear Seeing Toward Yourself, Will Affect How You Experience Your World. In Fact, It Will Transform How You Experience The World. What You Do For Yourself, You’re Doing For Others, And What You Do For Others, You’re Doing For Yourself.

Patience Is The Training In Abiding With The Restlessness Of Our Energy And Letting Things Evolve At Their Own Speed.

As Long As We're Caught Up In Always Looking For Certainty And Happiness, Rather Than Honoring The Taste And Smell And Quality Of Exactly What Is Happening, As Long As We're Always Running From Discomfort, We're Going To Be Caught In A Cycle Of Unhappiness And Discomfort, And We Will Feel Weaker And Weaker. This Way Of Seeing Helps Us Develop Inner Strength. And What's Especially Encouraging Is The View That Inner Strength Is Available To Us At Just The Moment When We Think That We've Hit The Bottom, When Things Are At Their Worst.

When We Cling To Thoughts And Memories, We Are Clinging To What Cannot Be Grasped. When We Touch These Phantoms And Let Them Go, We May Discover A Space, A Break In The Chatter, A Glimpse Of Open Sky. This Is Our Birthright—the Wisdom With Which We Were Born, The Vast Unfolding Display Of Primordial Richness, Primordial Openness, Primordial Wisdom Itself. When One Thought Has Ended And Another Has Not Yet Begun, We Can Rest In That Space.

We Come To Realize That Other People's Welfare Is Just As Important As Our Own. In Helping Them, We Help Ourselves. In Helping Ourselves, We Help The World.

Don’t Worry About Achieving. Don’t Worry About Perfection. Just Be There Each Moment As Best You Can.

Whatever You Are Doing, Take The Attitude Of Wanting It Directly Or Indirectly To Benefit Others. Take The Attitude Of Wanting It To Increase Your Experience Of Kinship With Your Fellow Beings.

We Can Stop Struggling With What Occurs And See Its True Face Without Calling It The Enemy. It Helps To Remember That Our Spiritual Practice Is Not About Accomplishing Anything - Not About Winning Or Losing - But About Ceasing To Struggle And Relaxing As It Is. That Is What We Are Doing When We Sit Down To Meditate. That Attitude Spreads Into The Rest Of Our Lives.

All The Wars, All The Hatred, All The Ignorance In The World Come Out Of Being So Invested In Our Opinions.

Things Falling Apart Is A Kind Of Testing And Also A Kind Of Healing.

If We Begin To Get In Touch With Whatever We Feel With Some Kind Of Kindness, Our Protective Shells Will Melt, And We'll Find That More Areas Of Our Lives Are Workable. As We Learn To Have Compassion For Ourselves, The Circle Of Compassion For Others-what And Whom We Can Work With, And How-becomes Wider.

We Work On Ourselves In Order To Help Others, But Also We Help Others In Order To Work On Ourselves.

Surrendering, Letting Go Of Possessiveness, And Complete Nonattachment-all Are Synonyms For Accumulating Merit.

Never Give Up On Yourself. Then You Will Never Give Up On Others.

At Some Point, We Realize That What We Do For Ourselves Benefits Others, And What We Do For Others Benefits Us.

Sometimes We Find That We Like Our Thoughts So Much That We Don't Want To Let Them Go.

Few Of Us Are Satisfied With Retreating From The World And Just Working On Ourselves. We Want Our Training To Manifest And To Be Of Benefit. The Bodhisattva-warrior, Therefore, Makes A Vow To Wake Up Not Just For Himself But For The Welfare Of All Beings.

Now Is The Only Time. How We Relate To It Creates The Future. In Other Words, If We're Going To Be More Cheerful In The Future, It's Because Of Our Aspiration And Exertion To Be Cheerful In The Present. What We Do Accumulates; The Future Is The Result Of What We Do Right Now.

While We Are Sitting In Meditation, We Are Simply Exploring Humanity And All Of Creation In The Form Of Ourselves. We Can Become The World's Greatest Experts On Anger, Jealousy, And Self-deprecatio N, As Well As On Joyfulness, Clarity, And Insight. Everything That Human Beings Feel, We Feel. We Can Become Extremely Wise And Sensitive To All Of Humanity And The Whole Universe Simply By Knowing Ourselves, Just As We Are.

Nothing Ever Goes Away Until It Has Taught Us What We Need To Know.

When We Touch The Center Of Sorrow, When We Sit With Discomfort Without Trying To Fix It, When We Stay Present To The Pain Of Disapproval Or Betrayal And Let It Soften Us, These Are Times That We Connect With Bohdichitta.

We See How Beautiful And Wonderful And Amazing Things Are, And We See How Caught Up We Are. It Isn’t That One Is The Bad Part And One Is The Good Part, But That It’s A Kind Of Interesting, Smelly, Rich, Fertile Mess Of Stuff. When It’s All Mixed Up Together, It’s Us: Humanness.

I'm Here To Tell You That The Path To Peace Is Right There, When You Want To Get Away.

Everybody Loves Something, Even If It's Only Tortillas.

A Thoroughly Good Relationship With Ourselves Results In Being Still, Which Doesn't Mean We Don't Run And Jump And Dance About. It Means There's No Compulsiveness. We Don't Overwork, Overeat, Oversmoke, Overseduce. In Short, We Begin To Stop Causing Harm.

Good Relationship

If Someone Comes Along And Shoots An Arrow Into Your Heart, It's Fruitless To Stand There And Yell At The Person. It Would Be Much Better To Turn Your Attention To The Fact That There's An Arrow In Your Heart.

Never Underestimate The Power Of Compassionately Recognizing What's Going On.

Never Underestimate

But All The Time Our Warmth And Brilliance Are Right Here. This Is Who We Really Are. We Are One Blink Of An Eye Away From Being Fully Awake.

All You Need To Know Is That The Future Is Wide Open And You Are About To Create It By What You Do.

Our Neurosis And Our Wisdom Are Made Out Of The Same Material. If You Throw Out Your Neurosis, You Also Throw Out Your Wisdom.

Meditation Accepts Us Just As We Are-in Both Our Tantrums And Our Bad Habits, In Our Love And Commitments And Happiness. It Allows Us To Have A More Flexible Identity Because We Learn To Accept Ourselves And All Of Our Human Experience With More Tenderness And Openness. We Learn To Accept The Present Moment With An Open Heart. Every Moment Is Incredibly Unique And Fresh, And When We Drop Into The Moment, As Meditation Allows Us To Do, We Learn How To Truly Taste This Tender And Mysterious Life That We Share Together.

We Tend To Forget That We Are Part Of The Natural Scheme Of Things.

Meditation Is Not A Matter Of Trying To Achieve Ecstasy, Spiritual Bliss, Or Tranquillity, Nor Is It Attempting To Become A Better Person. It Is Simply The Creation Of A Space In Which We Are Able To Expose And Undo Our Neurotic Games, Our Self-deceptions, Our Hidden Fears And Hopes.

Meditation Practice

It's Not A Terrible Thing That We Feel Fear When Faced With The Unknown. It Is A Part Of Being Alive, Something We All Share. We React Against The Possibility Of Loneliness, Of Death, Of Not Having Anything To Hold On To. Fear Is A Natural Reaction To Moving Closer To The Truth.

Openness Doesn’t Come From Resisting Our Fears But Rather From Getting To Know Them Well.

Welcome The Present Moment As If You Had Invited It. Why? Because It Is All We Ever Have.

We Can Gradually Drop Our Ideals Of Who We Think We Ought To Be, Or Who We Think We Want To Be, Or Who We Think Other People Think We Want To Be Or Ought To Be.

Like All Explorers, We Are Drawn To Discover What's Out There Without Knowing Yet If We Have The Courage To Face It.

Determination Means To Use Every Challenge You Meet As An Opportunity To Open Your Heart And Soften, Determined To Not Withdraw.

The First Noble Truth Of The Buddha Is That When We Feel Suffering, It Doesn’t Mean That Something Is Wrong. What A Relief.

Don't Worry About Achieving. Don't Worry About Perfection. Just Be There Each Moment As Best You Can. When You Realize You've Wandered Off Again, Simply Very Lightly Acknowledge That. This Light Touch Is The Golden Key To Reuniting With Our Openness.

A Further Sign Of Health Is That We Don't Become Undone By Fear And Trembling, But We Take It As A Message That It's Time To Stop Struggling And Look Directly At What's Threatening Us.

The Buddha Taught That Flexibility And Openness Bring Strength And That Running From Groundlessness Weakens Us And Brings Pain. But Do We Understand That Becoming Familiar With The Running Away Is The Key? Openness Doesn't Come From Resisting Our Fears But From Getting To Know Them Well

This Genuine Heart Of Sadness Can Teach Us Great Compassion. It Can Humble Us When We're Arrogant And Soften Us When We Are Unkind.

What's Encouraging About Meditation Is That, Even If We Shut Down, We Can No Longer Shut Down In Ignorance. We See Very Clearly That We're Closing Off. That In Itself Begins To Illuminate The Darkness Of Ignorance.

Meditation Practice

You Are The Sky. Everything Else - It’s Just The Weather.

Rather Than Going After Our Walls And Barriers With A Sledgehammer, We Pay Attention To Them. With Gentleness And Honesty, We Move Closer To Those Walls. We Touch Them And Smell Them And Get To Know Them Well. We Begin A Process Of Acknowledging Our Aversions And Our Cravings. We Become Familiar With The Strategies And Beliefs We Use To Build The Walls: What Are The Stories I Tell Myself? What Repels Me And What Attracts Me? We Start To Get Curious About What’s Going On.

Each Moment Is Just What It Is. It Might Be The Only Moment Of Our Life; It Might Be The Only Strawberry We'll Ever Eat. We Could Get Depressed About It, Or We Could Finally Appreciate It And Delight In The Preciousness Of Every Single Moment Of Our Life.

Just Where You Are-that's The Place To Start!

The Happiness We Seek Cannot Be Found Through Grasping, Trying To Hold On To Things. It Cannot Be Found Through Getting Serious And Uptight About Wanting Things To Go In The Direction We Think Will Bring Happiness. We Are Always Taking Hold Of The Wrong End Of The Stick. The Point Is That The Happiness We Seek Is Already Here And It Will Be Found Through Relaxation And Letting Go Rather Than Through Struggle.

The Treasure We Seek Requires No Lengthy Expedition, No Expensive Equipment, No Superior Aptitude Or Special Company. All We Lack Is The Willingness To Imagine That We Already Have Everything We Need. The Only Thing Missing Is Our Consent To Be Where We Are.

If You're Invested In Security And Certainty, You Are On The Wrong Planet.

A Warrior Accepts That We Can Never Know What Will Happen To Us Next.

Our True Nature Is Like A Precious Jewel: Although It May Be Temporarily Buried In Mud, It Remains Completely Brilliant And Unaffected. We Simply Have To Uncover It.

Treat Yourself As Your Own Beloved Child.

As We Learn To Have Compassion For Ourselves, The Circle Of Compassion For Others - What And Whom We Can Work With, And How - Becomes Wider.

We Don’t Experience The World Fully Unless We Are Willing To Give Everything Away. Samaya Means Not Holding Anything Back, Not Preparing Our Escape Route, Not Looking For Alternatives, Not Thinking That There Is Ample Time To Do Things Later

Underneath Our Ordinary Lives, Underneath All The Talking We Do, All The Moving We Do, All The Thoughts In Our Minds, There's A Fundamental Groundlessness. It's There Bubbling Along All The Time. We Experience It As Restlessness And Edginess. We Experience It As Fear. It Motivates Passion, Aggression, Ignorance, Jealousy, And Pride, But We Never Get Down To The Essence Of It.

Feeling Irritated, Restless, Afraid, And Hopeless Is A Reminder To Listen More Carefully.

Usually We Regard Loneliness As An Enemy. Heartache Is Not Something We Choose To Invite In. It's Restless And Pregnant And Hot With The Desire To Escape And Find Something Or Someone To Keep Us Company. When We Can Rest In The Middle, We Begin To Have A Nonthreatening Relationship With Loneliness, A Relaxing And Cooling Loneliness That Completely Turns Our Usual Fearful Patterns Upside Down.

Ordinarily We Are Swept Away By Habitual Momentum. We Don't Interrupt Our Patterns Even Slightly. With Practice, However, We Learn To Stay With A Broken Heart, With A Nameless Fear, With The Desire For Revenge. Sticking With Uncertainty Is How We Learn To Relax In The Midst Of Chaos, How We Learn To Be Cool When The Ground Beneath Us Suddenly Disappears.

The Very First Noble Truth Of The Buddha Points Out That Suffering Is Inevitable For Human Beings As Long As We Believe That Things Last—that They Don’t Disintegrate, That They Can Be Counted On To Satisfy Our Hunger For Security.

Anxiety, Heartbreak, And Tenderness Mark The In-between State. It's The Kind Of Place We Usually Want To Avoid. The Challenge Is To Stay In The Middle Rather Than Buy Into Struggle And Complaint. The Challenge Is To Let It Soften Us Rather Than Make Us More Rigid And Afraid.

Discomfort Of Any Kind Becomes The Basis For Practice. We Breathe In Knowing Our Pain Is Shared.

If You Have Rage And Righteously Act It Out And Blame It All On Others, It's Really You Who Suffers. The Other People And The Environment Suffer Also, But You Suffer More Because You're Being Eaten Up Inside With Rage, Causing You To Hate Yourself More And More

It's A Transformative Experience To Simply Pause Instead Of Immediately Fill Up The Space. By Waiting, We Begin To Connect With Fundamental Restlessness As Well As Fundamental Spaciousness. -pema Chodron, From "when Things Fall Apart

Sometimes People's Spiritual Ideas Become Fixed And They Use Them Against Those Who Don't Share Their Beliefs - In Effect, Becoming Fundamentalist. It's Very Dangerous - The Finger Of Righteous Indignation Pointing At Someone Who Is Identified As Bad Or Wrong.

One Way To Practice Staying Present Is To Simply Sit Still For A While And Listen. For One Minute, Listen To The Sounds Close To You. For One Minute, Listen To The Sounds At A Distance. Just Listen Attentively.

We Think That By Protecting Ourselves From Suffering, We Are Being Kind To Ourselves. The Truth Is We Only Become More Fearful, More Hardened And More Alienated. We Experience Ourselves As Being Separate From The Whole. This Separateness Becomes Like A Prison For Us - A Prison That Restricts Us To Our Personal Hopes And Fears, And To Caring Only For The People Nearest To Us. Curiously Enough, If We Primarily Try To Shield Ourselves From Discomfort, We Suffer. Yet, When We Don't Close Off, When We Let Our Hearts Break, We Discover Our Kinship With All Beings.

Patience Takes Courage. It Is Not An Ideal State Of Calm. In Fact, When We Practice Patience We Will See Our Agitation Far More Clearly.

The Peace That We Are Looking For Is Not Peace That Crumbles As Soon As There Is Difficulty Or Chaos. Whether We’re Seeking Inner Peace Or Global Peace Or A Combination Of The Two, The Way To Experience It Is To Build On The Foundation Of Unconditional Openness To All That Arises. Peace Isn’t An Experience Free Of Challenges, Free Of Rough And Smooth, It’s An Experience That’s Expansive Enough To Include All That Arises Without Feeling Threatened.

The Real Thing That We Renounce Is The Tenacious Hope That We Could Be Saved From Being Who We Are.

Feelings Like Disappointment, Embarrassment, Irritation, Resentment, Anger, Jealousy, And Fear, Instead Of Being Bad News, Are Actually Very Clear Moments That Teach Us Where It Is That We're Holding Back.

In Tonglen Practice, When We See Or Feel Suffering, We  breathe In With The Notion Of Completely Feeling It, Accepting It, And Owning It. Then We Breathe Out, Radiating Compassion, Lovingkindness, Freshness - Anything That Encourages Relaxation And Openness.  So You're Training In Softening, Rather Than Tightening, Your Heart. In This Practice, It's Not Uncommon To Find Yourself Blocked, Because You Come Face To Face With Your Own Fear, Resistance, Or Whatever Your Personal "stuckness" Happens To Be At That Moment.

Right Down There In The Thick Of Things, We Discover The Love That Will Not Die.

While We Are Sitting In Meditation, We Are Simply Exploring Humanity And All Of Creation In The Form Of Ourselves.

Many People Hope A Spiritual Practice Will Let Them Avoid What They Are Ashamed Of. But When You Hide Something From Yourself, You Are Going To Project It Onto Your World. You Continually Find It In Others And It Becomes The Source Of Prejudices And Dogmatic Views. On Top Of That, You Feel Bad About Yourself, Because You Aren't The Loving, Open-minded, "spiritual" Person You'd Like To Be.

The Root Of Compassion, Is Compassion For Oneself.

Fear Is A Natural Reaction Of Moving Closer To The Truth. If We Commit Ourselves To Staying Right Where We Are, Then Our Experience Becomes Very Vivid. Things Become Very Clear When There Is Nowhere To Escape.

Obstacles Are Our Friends: They Teach Us Where We're Stuck.

To Be Fully Alive, Fully Human, And Completely Awake Is To Be Continually Thrown Out Of The Nest.

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