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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Pema Chödrön
When you connect with your own suffering, reflect that countless beings at this very moment are feeling exactly what you feel. Their story lines are different but the feeling of pain is the same.
The people who repel us unwittingly show us aspects of ourselves that we find unacceptable, which otherwise we can’t see.
other people trigger the karma that we haven’t worked out.
It keeps returning with new names, forms, and manifestations until we learn whatever it has to teach us: Where are we separating ourselves from reality? How are we pulling back instead of opening up? How are we closing down instead of allowing ourselves to experience fully whatever we encounter?
There are six ways of describing this kind of cool loneliness: Less desire is the willingness to be lonely without resolution when everything in us yearns for something to change our mood. Contentment means that we no longer believe that escaping our loneliness is going to bring happiness or courage or strength. Avoiding unnecessary activities means that we stop looking for something to entertain us or to save us. Complete discipline means that at every opportunity, we’re willing to come back to the present moment with compassionate attention. Not wandering in the world of desire is about
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You can hear the dharma from many different places, but you are uncommitted until you encounter a particular way that rings true in your heart and you decide to follow it.
In every moment, we make a choice: Which way do we go? How do we relate with the raw material of our existence?
We notice if we feel attraction, aversion, or indifference, without adding anything extra like self-judgment. We might feel compassion toward someone who looks depressed, or cheered up by someone who’s smiling to himself. We might feel fear and aversion for another person without even knowing why. Noticing where we open up and where we shut down—without praise or blame—is the basis of our practice.
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. It means thinking there’s always going to be a babysitter available when we need one. We all are inclined to abdicate our responsibilities and delegate our authority to something outside ourselves.
Nontheism is relaxing with the ambiguity and uncertainty of the present moment without reaching for anything to protect ourselves.
impermanence and egolessness, the truth that nothing—including ourselves—is solid or predictable.
our tendency to seek solid ground is deeply rooted. Ego can use anything to maintain the illusion of security, including the belief in insubstantiality and change.
Any conclusions we might draw must be let go. The only way to fully understand the teachings, the only way to practice them fully, is to abide in unconditional openness, patiently cutting through all our tendencies to hang on.
This instruction—known as the Heart Sutra—is a teaching on fearlessness. To the extent that we stop struggling against uncertainty and ambiguity, to that extent we dissolve our fear. Total fearlessness is full enlightenment—
“Form is emptiness” refers to our simple, direct relationship with the immediacy of experience.
But “emptiness also is form” turns the tables. Emptiness continually manifests as war and peace, as grief, birth, old age, sickness, and death, as well as joy. We are challenged to stay in touch with the heartthrobbing quality of being alive.
That’s what we’re going to discover again and again and again. Nothing is what we thought.
As long as we believe that there is something that will permanently satisfy our hunger for security, suffering is inevitable.
In order to be gentle and create an atmosphere of compassion for yourself, it’s necessary to stop talking to yourself about how wrong everything is—or how right everything is, for that matter.
as my trust grew, I found that that’s what happens—the intensity of the emotion lessens, and so does the duration. This happens because the ego begins to be ventilated. We are all primarily addicted to ME. This big solid ME begins to be aerated when we go against the grain and abide with our feelings instead of blaming the other.
AS WE BECOME more open, we might think that it’s going to take bigger catastrophes to make us want to exit in our habitual ways. The interesting thing is that, as we open more and more, it’s the big ones that immediately wake us up and the little things that catch us off guard.
is. If our experience is that sometimes we have some kind of perspective, and sometimes we have none, then that’s our experience.
We can at least begin to question our assumptions. Could it be that whether we are awake or asleep, we are simply moving from one dreamlike state to another?
Gloriousness and wretchedness need each other. One inspires us, the other softens us. They go together.
Even if we live to be 108, life will still be too short for witnessing all its wonders.
Do we at least aspire to not consider ourselves a problem, but simply a pretty typical human being who could at that moment give him- or herself a break and stop being so predictable?
This path has one very distinct characteristic: it is not prefabricated. It doesn’t already exist. The path that we’re talking about is the moment-by-moment evolution of our experience, the moment-by-moment evolution of the world of phenomena, the moment-by-moment evolution of our thoughts and emotions. The path is uncharted. It comes into existence moment by moment and at the same time drops away behind us. When we realize that the path is the goal, there’s a sense of workability. Everything that occurs in our confused mind we can regard as the path. Everything is workable.
We have to gradually develop the confidence that it is liberating to let go.
We are encouraged to be curious about the neurosis that’s bound to kick in when our coping mechanisms start falling apart. This is how we get to the place where we stop believing in our personal myths, the place where we are not always divided against ourselves, always resisting our own energy. This is how we learn to abide in basic goodness.
