The Places That Scare You Quotes

“Rejoicing in ordinary things is not sentimental or trite. It actually takes guts.”
― Pema Chödrön, The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times

“Authentic joy is not a euphoric state or a feeling of being high. Rather, it is a state of appreciation that allows us to participate fully in our lives. We train in rejoicing in the good fortune of self and others.”
― Pema Chödrön, The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times

“This is the path we take in cultivating joy: learning not to armor our basic goodness, learning to appreciate what we have. Most of the time we don’t do this. Rather than appreciate where we are, we continually struggle and nurture our dissatisfaction. It’s like trying to get the flowers to grow by pouring cement on the garden.”
― Pema Chödrön, The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times

“Meditation practice is regarded as a good and in fact excellent way to overcome warfare in the world: our own warfare as well as greater warfare. —CHÖGYAM TRUNGPA RINPOCHE”
― Pema Chödrön, The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times

“Making the aspirations is like watering the seed of goodwill so it can begin to grow. In the course of doing this we’ll become acquainted with our barriers—numbness, inadequacy, skepticism, resentment, righteous indignation, pride, and all the others. As we continue to do this practice, we make friends with our fears, our grasping, and our aversion. Unconditional good heart toward others is not even a possibility unless we attend to our own demons. Everything we encounter thus becomes an opportunity for practicing loving-kindness.”
― Pema Chödrön, The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times

“First, if we have not set up the target, it cannot be hit by an arrow. This is to say that each time we retaliate with aggressive words and actions, we are strengthening the habit of anger. As long as we do this, without doubt, plenty of arrows will come our way. We will become increasingly irritated by the reactions of others. However, each time we are provoked, we are given a chance to do something different. We can strengthen old habits by setting up the target or we can weaken them by holding our seat.”
― Pema Chödrön, The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times

“Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It’s a relationship between equals.”
― Pema Chödrön, The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times

“equanimity.”
― Pema Chödrön, The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times

“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 about who we are—or who anyone else is either.”
― Pema Chödrön, The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times

“The formal practice of loving-kindness or maitri has seven stages. We begin by engendering loving-kindness for ourselves and then expand it at out own pace to include loved ones, friends, "neutral" persons, those who irritate us, all of the above as a group, and finally, all beings throughout time and space. We gradually widen the circle of loving-kindness.”
― Pema Chödrön, The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times

“Strong determination is our commitment to use our lives to dissolve the indifference, aggression, and grasping that separate us from one another. It is a commitment to respect whatever life brings. As warriors-in-training we develop wholehearted determination to use discomfort as an opportunity for awakening, rather than trying to make it disappear. How do we abide with disagreeable emotions without retreating into our familiar strategies? How do we catch our thoughts before they become 100 percent believable and solidify into “us” against “them”? Where do we find the warmth that is essential to the transformative process? We are committed to exploring these questions. We are determined to find a way to realize our kinship with others, determined to keep training in opening our mind. This strong determination generates strength.”
― Pema Chödrön, The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times

“Chitta means “mind” and also “heart” or “attitude.” Bodhi means “awake,” “enlightened,” or “completely open.” Sometimes the completely open heart and mind of bodhichitta is called the soft spot, a place as vulnerable and tender as an open wound. It is equated, in part, with our ability to love. Even the cruelest people have this soft spot. Even the most vicious animals love their offspring. As Trungpa Rinpoche put it, “Everybody loves something, even if it’s only tortillas.” Bodhichitta is also equated, in part, with compassion—our ability to feel the pain that we share with others. Without realizing it we continually shield ourselves from this pain because it scares us. We put up protective walls made of opinions, prejudices, and strategies, barriers that are built on a deep fear of being hurt. These walls are further fortified by emotions of all kinds: anger, craving, indifference, jealousy and envy, arrogance and pride. But fortunately for us, the soft spot—our innate ability to love and to care about things—is like a crack in these walls we erect. It’s a natural opening in the barriers we create when we’re afraid. With practice we can learn to find this opening. We can learn to seize that vulnerable moment—love, gratitude, loneliness, embarrassment, inadequacy—to awaken bodhichitta. An analogy for bodhichitta is the rawness of a broken heart. Sometimes this broken heart gives birth to anxiety and panic, sometimes to anger, resentment, and blame. But under the hardness of that armor there is the tenderness of genuine sadness. This is our link with all those who have ever loved. 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. It awakens us when we prefer to sleep and pierces through our indifference. This continual ache of the heart is a blessing that when accepted fully can be shared with all. The Buddha said that we are never separated from enlightenment. Even at the times we feel most stuck, we are never alienated from the awakened state. This is a revolutionary assertion. Even ordinary people like us with hang-ups and confusion have this mind of enlightenment called bodhichitta. The openness and warmth of bodhichitta is in fact our true nature and condition. Even when our neurosis feels far more basic than our wisdom, even when we’re feeling most confused and hopeless, bodhichitta—like the open sky—is always here, undiminished by the clouds that temporarily cover it.”
― Pema Chödrön, The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times

“we can let the circumstances of our lives harden us so that we become increasingly resentful and afraid, or we can let them soften us and make us kinder and more open to what scares us.”
― Pema Chödrön, The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times

“As the Zen master Suzuki Roshi put it, “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.”
― Pema Chödrön, The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times

“Even when our neurosis feels far more basic than our wisdom, even when we’re feeling most confused and hopeless, bodhichitta—like the open sky—is always here, undiminished by the clouds that temporarily cover it.”
― Pema Chödrön, The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times

“Denigrating ourselves is probably the major way that we cover over bodhichitta [open heart]. Does not trying to change mean we have to remain angry and addicted until the day we die? This is a reasonable question. Trying to change ourselves doesn’t work in the long run because we’re resisting our own energy. Self-improvement can have temporary results, but lasting transformation occurs only when we honor ourselves as the source of wisdom and compassion. We are, as the eighth-century Buddhist master Shantideva pointed out, very much like a blind person who finds a jewel buried in a heap of garbage. Right here in what we’d like to throw away, in what we find repulsive and frightening, we discover the warmth and clarity of bodhichitta.”
― Pema Chödrön, The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times

“Even though peak experiences might show us the truth and inform us about why we are training, they are essentially no big deal. If we can't integrate them into the ups and downs of our lives, if we cling to them, they will hinder us. We can trust our experiences as valid, but then we have to move on and learn how to get along with our neighbors. Then even the most remarkable insights can begin to permeate our lives. As the twelfth-century Tibetian yogi Milarepa said when he heard of his student Gampopa's peak experiences, 'They are neither good not bad. Keep meditation.' ”
― Pema Chödrön, The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times

“In other traditions demons are expelled externally. But in my tradition demons are accepted with compassion.”
― Pema Chödrön, The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times

“Anxiety, heartbreak, and tenderness mark the inbetween 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. Becoming intimate with the queasy feeling of being in the middle of nowhere only makes our hearts more tender. When we are brave enough to stay in the middle, compassion arises spontaneously. By not knowing, not hoping to know, and not acting like we know what’s happening, we begin to access our inner strength.”
― Pema Chödrön, The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times

“AS A SPECIES, we should never underestimate our low tolerance for discomfort.”
― Pema Chödrön, The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times

“It is with this unfixated mind of prajna that we practice generosity, discipline, enthusiasm, patience, and meditation, moving from narrow-mindedness to flexibility and fearlessness.”
― Pema Chödrön, The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times

“The secret of Zen is just two words: not always so. —SHUNRYU SUZUKI ROSHI”
― Pema Chödrön, The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times

“threefold purity—no big deal about the doer, no big deal about the action, no big deal about the result. This joyful exertion is rooted in no expectation, no ambition, no hope of fruition.”
― Pema Chödrön, The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times

“The essence of generosity is letting go. Pain is always a sign that we are holding on to something—usually ourselves.”
― Pema Chödrön, The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times

“Openness doesn’t come from resisting our fears but from getting to know them well.”
― Pema Chödrön, The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times

“It’s about being able to stay present with ourselves. It becomes increasingly clear that we won’t be free of self-destructive patterns unless we develop a compassionate understanding of what they are.”
― Pema Chödrön, The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times

“Those who train wholeheartedly in awakening unconditional and relative bodhichitta are called bodhisattvas or warriors—not warriors who kill and harm but warriors of nonaggression who hear the cries of the world. These are men and women who are willing to train in the middle of the fire. Training in the middle of the fire can mean that warrior-bodhisattvas enter challenging situations in order to alleviate suffering. It also refers to their willingness to cut through personal reactivity and self-deception, to their dedication to uncovering the basic undistorted energy of bodhichitta.”
― Pema Chödrön, The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times

“Being caught by the lord of speech may start with just a reasonable conviction about what we feel to be true. However, if we find ourselves becoming righteously indignant, that's a sure sign we've gone too far and that our ability to effect change will be hindered. Beliefs and ideals have become just another way to put up walls.”
― Pema Chödrön, The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times

“Whether the reality of change is a source of freedom for us or a source of horrific anxiety makes a significant difference. Do the days of our lives add up to further suffering or to increased capacity for joy? That’s an important question.”
― Pema Chödrön, The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times

“THE BUDDHA TAUGHT that there are three principal characteristics of human existence: impermanence, egolessness, and suffering or dissatisfaction. According to the Buddha, the lives of all beings are marked by these three qualities. Recognizing these qualities to be real and true in our own experience helps us to relax with things as they are. When”
― Pema Chödrön, The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times