Practicing Peace in Times of War Quotes

“When you open yourself to the continually changing, impermanent, dynamic nature of your own being and of reality, you increase your capacity to love and care about other people and your capacity to not be afraid. You're able to keep your eyes open, your heart open, and your mind open. And you notice when you get caught up in prejudice, bias, and aggression. You develop an enthusiasm for no longer watering those negative seeds, from now until the day you die. And, you begin to think of your life as offering endless opportunities to start to do things differently.”
― Pema Chödrön, Practicing Peace in Times of War

“What I'm advocating here is something that requires courage — the courage to have a change of heart. The reason this requires courage is because when we don't do the habitual thing, hardening our heart and holding tightly to certain views, then we're left with the underlying uneasiness that we were trying to get away from. Whenever there's a sense of threat, we harden. And so if we don't harden, what happens? We're left with that uneasiness, that feeling of threat. That's when the real journey of courage begins. This is the real work of the peacemaker, to find the soft spot and the tenderness in that very uneasy place and stay with it. If we can stay with the soft spot and stay with the tender heart, then we are cultivating the seeds of peace”
― Pema Chödrön, Practicing Peace in Times of War

“But the Buddhist teachings also say that this is not really what causes us misery in our lives. What causes misery is always try-ing to get away from the facts of life, always trying to avoid pain and seek happiness— this sense of ours that there could be lasting security and happiness available to us if we could only do the right thing.
In this very lifetime we can do ourselves and this planet a great favor and turn this very old way of thinking upside down. As Shantideva points out, suffering has a great deal to teach us. If we use the opportunity when it arises, suffering will motivate us to look for answers. Many people, including myself, came to the spiritual path because of deep unhappiness. Suffering can also teach us empathy for others who are in the same boat. Furthermore, suffering can humble us. Even the most arrogant among us can be softened by the loss of someone dear.
Yet it is so basic in us to feel that things should go well for us, and that if we start to feel depressed, lonely, or inadequate, there’s been some kind of mistake or we’ve lost it.
In reality, when you feel depressed, lonely, betrayed, or any unwanted feelings, this is an important moment on the spiritual path.
This is where real transformation can take place.”
― Pema Chödrön, Practicing Peace in Times of War

“When we’re putting up the barriers and the sense of “me” as separate from “you” gets stronger, right there in the midst of difficulty and pain, the whole thing could turn around simply by not erecting barriers; simply by staying open to the difficulty, to the feelings that you’re going through; simply by not talking to ourselves about what’s happening. That is a revolutionary step. Becoming intimate with pain is the key to changing at the core of our being—staying open to everything we experience, letting the sharpness of difficult times pierce us to the heart, letting these times open us, humble us, and make us wiser and more brave. Let difficulty transform you. And it will. In my experience, we just need help in learning how not to run away.”
― Pema Chödrön, Practicing Peace in Times of War

“When you open yourself to the continually changing, impermanent, dynamic nature of your own being and of reality, you increase your capacity to love and care about other people and your capacity to not be afraid.”
― Pema Chödrön, Practicing Peace in Times of War

“Rudolph Bahro. He writes, “When an old culture is dying, the new culture is created by those people who are not afraid to be insecure.”
― Pema Chödrön, Practicing Peace in Times of War

“According to these teachings, what we experience in the present is the result of the seeds we ve sown for hundreds of years, over the course of many lifetimes.”
― Pema Chödrön, Practicing Peace in Times of War

“Cultivating absolute bodhichitta means having a relationship with the world that is nonconceptual, that is unprejudiced, having a direct, unedited relationship with reality.”
― Pema Chödrön, Practicing Peace in Times of War

“That sticky feeling is shenpa.”
― Pema Chödrön, Practicing Peace in Times of War

“You begin to have the clarity to see injustice happening, but you can also see that injustice, by its very definition, is harming everybody involved. It’s harming the people who are being oppressed or abused, and it’s harming those who are oppressing and abusing.”
― Pema Chödrön, Practicing Peace in Times of War

“A fundamentalist mind is a mind that has become rigid. First the heart closes, then the mind becomes hardened into a view, then you can justify your hatred of another human being because of what they represent and what they say and do.”
― Pema Chödrön, Practicing Peace in Times of War

“We point our fingers at the wrongdoers, but we ourselves are mirror images; everyone is outraged at everyone else’s wrongness.”
― Pema Chödrön, Practicing Peace in Times of War

“If there are whole parts of yourself that you are always running from, that you even feel justified in running from, then you’re going to run from anything that brings you into contact with your feelings of insecurity.
And have you noticed how often these parts of ourselves get touched? The closer you get to a situation or a person, the more these feelings arise. Often when you’re in a relationship it starts off great, but when it gets intimate and begins to bring out your neurosis, you just want to get out of there.
So I’m here to tell you that the path to peace is right there, when you want to get away.
You can cruise through life not letting anything touch you, but if you really want to live fully, if you want to enter into life, enter into genuine relationships with other people, with animals, with the world situa-tion, you’re def i nitely going to have the ex-perience of feeling provoked, of getting hooked, of shenpa. You’re not just going to feel bliss. The message is that when those feelings emerge, this is not a failure. This is the chance to cultivate maitri, unconditional friendliness toward your perfect and imperfect self.”
― Pema Chödrön, Practicing Peace in Times of War