When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times (Shambhala Classics)

by Pema Chödrön

“Am I going to practice peace, or am I going to war?”

Question of the warrior

all this is really a dream, I might as well spend it trying to look at what scares me instead of running

If this is a dream

to respect ourselves enough not to judge it.

Respect ourselves

Refraining is a way of making friends with ourselves at the most profound level possible.

Making friends with ourselves

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.

Emergent emergence

how do I learn to communicate with somebody who is hurting me or someone who is hurting a lot of people? How do I speak to someone so that some change actually occurs? How do I communicate so that the space opens up and both of us begin to touch in to some kind of basic intelligence that we all share?

Communicating when someone hurts me

increase. Cultivating nonaggression is cultivating peace. The way to stop the war is to stop hating the enemy. It starts with seeing our opinions of ourselves and of others as simply our take on reality and not making them a reason to increase the negativity on the planet.

Stop war