Awakening Loving-Kindness Quotes

“But loving-kindness—maitri—toward ourselves doesn’t mean getting rid of anything. Maitri means that we can still be crazy after all these years. We can still be angry after all these years. We can still be timid or jealous or full of feelings of unworthiness. The point is not to try to change ourselves. Meditation practice isn’t about trying to throw ourselves away and become something better. It’s about befriending who we are already. The ground of practice is you or me or whoever we are right now, just as we are. That’s the ground, that’s what we study, that’s what we come to know with tremendous curiosity and interest.”
― Pema Chödrön, Awakening Loving-Kindness

“Life’s work is to wake up, to let the things that enter into the circle wake you up rather than put you to sleep. The only way to do this is to open, be curious, and develop some sense of sympathy for everything that comes along, to get to know its nature and let it teach you what it will.”
― Pema Chödrön, Awakening Loving-Kindness

“Our journey of making friends with ourselves is not a selfish thing. We’re not trying to get all the goodies for ourselves. It’s a process of developing loving-kindness and a true understanding for other people as well.”
― Pema Chödrön, Awakening Loving-Kindness

“There are wars all over the world because people are insulted that someone else doesn’t agree with their belief system. Everybody is guilty of it. It’s what is called fundamental theism. You want something to hold on to, you want to say, “Finally I have found it. This is it, and now I feel confirmed and secure and righteous.” Buddhism is not free of it either. This is a human thing. But in Buddhism there is a teaching that would seemingly undercut all this, if people would only listen to it. It says, “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill the Buddha.”
― Pema Chödrön, Awakening Loving-Kindness

“Joy has to do with seeing how big, how completely unobstructed, and how precious things are. Resenting what happens to you and complaining about your life are like refusing to smell the wild roses when you go for a morning walk, or like being so blind that you don’t see a huge black raven when it lands in the tree that you’re sitting under. We can get so caught up in our own personal pain or worries that we don’t notice that the wind has come up or that somebody has put flowers on the diningroom table or that when we walked out in the morning, the flags weren’t up, and that when we came back, they were flying.”
― Pema Chödrön, Awakening Loving-Kindness

“So have a good journey home, and always remember—never give up!”
― Pema Chödrön, Awakening Loving-Kindness

“When you find yourself with these old, familiar feelings of anxiety because your world is falling apart and you’re not measuring up to your image of yourself and everybody is irritating you beyond words because no one is doing what you want and everyone is wrecking everything and you feel terrible about yourself and you don’t like anybody else and your whole life is fraught with emotional misery and confusion and conflict, at that point just remember that you’re going through all this emotional upheaval because your coziness has just been, in some small or large way, addressed.”
― Pema Chödrön, Awakening Loving-Kindness

“The waves just keep coming and knocking you down, but you stand up again and with some sense of rousing yourself, standing up.”
― Pema Chödrön, Awakening Loving-Kindness

“The law of karma is that we sow the seeds and we reap the fruit.”
― Pema Chödrön, Awakening Loving-Kindness

“It’s up to you how to use your life. It doesn’t mean that you have to be the best one at cheering up, or that your habitual tendencies never get the better of you. It just has to do with this sense of reminding yourself.”
― Pema Chödrön, Awakening Loving-Kindness

“Trying to cheer yourself up isn’t easy, and sometimes it feels hypocritical, like going against the grain. But the reminder is that if you want to change your habitual stuckness, you’re the only one who can do it.”
― Pema Chödrön, Awakening Loving-Kindness

“Every time you’re willing to acknowledge your thoughts, let them go, and come back to the freshness of the present moment, you’re sowing seeds of wakefulness in your unconscious.”
― Pema Chödrön, Awakening Loving-Kindness

“The third reminder is karma: every action has a result. One could give a whole seminar on the law of karma. But fundamentally, in our everyday life, it’s a reminder that it’s important how we live.”
― Pema Chödrön, Awakening Loving-Kindness

“Fear can make you start asking a lot of questions. If it doesn’t get you down, it’s going to start you wondering, “What’s this fear? Where did it come from? What am I scared of?” Maybe you’re scared of the most exciting things you have yet to learn. Impermanence is a great reminder.”
― Pema Chödrön, Awakening Loving-Kindness

“Impermanence can teach you a lot about how to cheer up.”
― Pema Chödrön, Awakening Loving-Kindness

“Remembering impermanence motivates you to go back and look at the teachings, to see what they tell you about how to work with your life, how to rouse yourself, how to cheer up, how to work with emotions.”
― Pema Chödrön, Awakening Loving-Kindness

“If you realize that you don’t have that many more years to live and if you live your life as if you actually had only a day left, then the sense of impermanence heightens that feeling of preciousness and gratitude.”
― Pema Chödrön, Awakening Loving-Kindness

“The second reminder is impermanence. Life is very brief. Even if we live to be a hundred, it’s very brief.”
― Pema Chödrön, Awakening Loving-Kindness

“So when I would start to become depressed, I would remember, “Now wait a minute. Maybe I just have to figure out how to rouse myself genuinely, because there are a lot of people suffering like this, and if I can do it, they can do it.”
― Pema Chödrön, Awakening Loving-Kindness

“Whatever you do, don’t try to make those feelings go away.” His advice went on: “Anything you can learn about working with your sense of discouragement or your sense of fear or your sense of bewilderment or your sense of feeling inferior or your sense of resentment—anything you can do to work with those things—do it, please, because it will be such an inspiration to other people.”
― Pema Chödrön, Awakening Loving-Kindness

“We see ourselves in every episode; we realize that it’s possible to keep going and never give up. We feel devotion toward the lineage of people who have worked so hard to make it easier for us.”
― Pema Chödrön, Awakening Loving-Kindness

“Beginning to realize how precious life is becomes one of your most powerful tools.”
― Pema Chödrön, Awakening Loving-Kindness

“The basic thing is to realize that we have everything going for us. We don’t have extreme pain that’s inescapable. We don’t have total pleasure that lulls us into ignorance. When we start feeling depressed, it’s helpful to reflect on that. Maybe this is a good time to read the newspapers a lot and remember how terrifying life can be.”
― Pema Chödrön, Awakening Loving-Kindness

“THE TRADITIONAL four reminders are basic reminders of why one might make a continual effort to return to the present moment. The first one reminds us of our precious human birth; the second, of the truth of impermanence; the third, of the law of karma; and the fourth, of the futility of continuing to wander in samsara.”
― Pema Chödrön, Awakening Loving-Kindness

“With great kindness and love, out of your own experience of what’s possible, you give them the wisdom that somebody else probably gave you the day before when you were miserable. You encourage them not to buy into their self-pity but to realize that it’s an opportunity to grow, and that everybody goes through this experience. In other words, the sangha are people committed to helping one another to take off their armor, by not encouraging their weakness”
― Pema Chödrön, Awakening Loving-Kindness

“Taking refuge in the buddha means that you are willing to spend your life acknowledging or reconnecting with your awakeness, learning that every time you meet the dragon you take off more armor, particularly the armor that covers your heart.”
― Pema Chödrön, Awakening Loving-Kindness

“Working with obstacles is life’s journey. The warrior is always coming up against dragons. Of course the warrior gets scared, particularly before the battle. It’s frightening. But with a shaky, tender heart the warrior realizes that he or she is just about to step into the unknown, and then goes forth to meet the dragon.”
― Pema Chödrön, Awakening Loving-Kindness

“On the other hand, this need to cling, this need to hold the hand, this cry for Mom, also shows you that that’s the edge of the nest. Stepping through right there—making a leap—becomes the motivation for cultivating maitri. You realize that if you can step through that doorway, you’re going forward, you’re becoming more of an adult, more of a complete person, more whole.”
― Pema Chödrön, Awakening Loving-Kindness

“This is where, through my mindfulness and my tonglen and everything that I do, my whole life is a process of learning how to make friends with myself.”
― Pema Chödrön, Awakening Loving-Kindness

“The point is that you begin where you are, you see what a child you are, and you don’t criticize that. You begin to explore, with a lot of humor and generosity toward yourself, all the places where you cling, and every time you cling, you realize, “Ah!”
― Pema Chödrön, Awakening Loving-Kindness