Taking the Leap Quotes

“Words themselves are neutral. It's the charge we add to them that matters”
― Pema Chödrön, Taking the Leap: Freeing Ourselves from Old Habits and Fears

“Whether we’re seeking inner peace or global peace or a combination of the two, the way to experience it is to build on the foundation of unconditional openness to all that arises. Peace isn’t an experience free of challenges, free of rough and smooth, it’s an experience that’s expansive enough to include all that arises without feeling threatened.”
― Pema Chödrön, Taking the Leap: Freeing Ourselves from Old Habits and Fears

“When things fall apart and we can’t get the pieces back together, when we lose something dear to us, when they whole thing is just not working and we don’t know what to do, this is the time when the natural warmth of tenderness, the warmth of empathy and kindness, are just waiting to be uncovered, just waiting to be embraced. This is our chance to come out of our self-protecting bubble and to realize that we are never alone. This is our chance to finally understand that wherever we go, everyone we meet is essentially just like us. Our own suffering, if we turn toward it, can open us to a loving relationship with the world.”
― Pema Chödrön, Taking the Leap: Freeing Ourselves from Old Habits and Fears

“A Native American grandfather was speaking to his grandson about violence and cruelty in the world and how it comes about. He said it was as if two wolves were fighting in his heart. One wolf was vengeful and angry, and the other wolf was understanding and kind. The young man asked his grandfather which wolf would win the fight in his heart. And the grandfather answered, “The one that wins will be the one I choose to feed.”
― Pema Chödrön, Taking the Leap: Freeing Ourselves from Old Habits and Fears

“When we feel dread, when we feel discomfort of any kind, it can connect us at the heart with all the other people feeling dread and discomfort. We can pause and touch into dread. We can touch bitterness of rejection and the rawness of being slighted. Whether we are at home or in a public spot or caught in a traffic jam or walking into a movie, we can stop and look at the other people there and realize that in pain and in joy they are just like me. Just like me they don’t want to feel physical pain or insecurity or rejection. Just like me they want to feel respected and physically comfortable.”
― Pema Chödrön, Taking the Leap: Freeing Ourselves from Old Habits and Fears

“the life span of any particular emotion is only one and a half minutes. After that we have to revive the emotion and get it going again.”
― Pema Chödrön, Taking the Leap: Freeing Ourselves from Old Habits and Fears

“The Buddhist explanation is that we feel this uneasiness because we’re always trying to get ground under our feet and it never quite works. We’re always looking for a permanent reference point, and it doesn’t exist. Everything is impermanent. Everything is always changing—fluid, unfixed, and open. Nothing is pin-down-able the way we’d like it to be. This is not actually bad news, but we all seem to be programmed for denial. We have absolutely no tolerance for uncertainty. It seems that insecurity”
― Pema Chödrön, Taking the Leap: Freeing Ourselves from Old Habits and Fears

“With the global economy in chaos and the environment of the planet at risk, with war raging and suffering escalating, it is time for each of us in our own lives to take the leap and do whatever we can to help turn things around.”
― Pema Chödrön, Taking the Leap: Freeing Ourselves from Old Habits and Fears

“The source of our unease is the unfulfillable longing for a lasting certainty and security, for something solid to hold on to.”
― Pema Chödrön, Taking the Leap: Freeing Ourselves from Old Habits and Fears

“There is a deep-seated tendency, it’s almost a compulsion, to distract ourselves, even when we’re not consciously feeling uncomfortable. Everybody feels a little bit of an itch all the time. There’s a background hum of edginess, boredom, restlessness. As I’ve said, during my time in retreat where there were almost no distractions, even there I experienced this deep uneasiness. The”
― Pema Chödrön, Taking the Leap: Freeing Ourselves from Old Habits and Fears

“There comes a time when we are able to be pierced to the heart by our own suffering and the suffering of others, and by our own regrets, without it dragging us down. We can hold the sadness of life in our hearts while never forgetting the beauty of the world, and the goodness of being alive.”
― Pema Chödrön, Taking the Leap: Freeing Ourselves from Old Habits and Fears

“In the Buddhist teachings on compassion there’s a practice called “one at the beginning, and one at the end.” When I wake up in the morning, I do this practice. I make an aspiration for the day. For example, I might say, “Today, may I acknowledge whenever I get hooked.” Or, “May I not speak or act out of anger.” I try not to make it too grandiose, as in, “Today, may I be completely free of all neurosis.” I begin with a clear intention, and then I go about the day with this in mind. In the evening, I review what happened. This is the part that can be so loaded for Western people. We have an unfortunate tendency to emphasize our failures. But when Dzigar Kongtrül teaches about this, he says that for him, when he sees that he has connected with his aspiration even once briefly during the whole day, he feels a sense of rejoicing. He also says that when he recognizes he lost it completely, he rejoices that he has the capacity to see that. This way of viewing ourselves has been very inspiring for me. He encourages us to ask what it is in us, after all, that sees that we lost it. Isn’t it our own wisdom, our own insight, our own natural intelligence? Can we just have the aspiration, then, to identify with the wisdom that acknowledges that we hurt someone’s feelings, or that we smoked when we said we wouldn’t? Can we have the aspiration to identify more and more with our ability to recognize what we’re doing instead of always identifying with our mistakes? This is the spirit of delighting in what we see rather than despairing in what we see. It’s the spirit of letting compassionate self-reflection build confidence rather than becoming a cause for depression. Being”
― Pema Chödrön, Taking the Leap: Freeing Ourselves from Old Habits and Fears

“The message here is that the only way to ease our pain is to experience it fully. Learn to stay. Learn to stay with uneasiness, learn to stay with the tightening, learn to stay with the itch and urge of shenpa, so that the habitual chain reaction doesn’t continue to rule our lives, and the patterns that we consider unhelpful don’t keep getting stronger as the days and months and years go by.”
― Pema Chödrön, Taking the Leap: Freeing Ourselves from Old Habits and Fears

“Gradually we can begin to cherish the preciousness of our whole life just as it is, with its ups and downs, its failures and successes, its roughness and smoothness.”
― Pema Chödrön, Taking the Leap: Freeing Ourselves from Old Habits and Fears

“Instead of blaming our discomfort on outer circumstances or on our own weakness, we can choose to stay present and awake to our experience, not rejecting it, not grasping it, not buying the stories that we relentlessly tell ourselves.”
― Pema Chodron, Taking the Leap: Freeing Ourselves from Old Habits and Fears

“Once you see what you do, how you get hooked, and how you get swept away, it’s hard to be arrogant. This honest recognition softens you up, humbles you in the best sense. It also begins to give you confidence in your basic goodness. When we are not blinded by the intensity of our emotions, when we allow a bit of space, a chance for a gap, when we pause, we naturally know what to do. We begin, due to our own wisdom, to move toward letting go and fearlessness. Due to our own wisdom, we gradually stop strengthening habits that only bring more pain to the world.”
― Pema Chödrön, Taking the Leap: Freeing Ourselves from Old Habits and Fears

“When I realize I’m triggered, I think of it as a neutral moment, a moment in time, a moment of truth that can go either way. What I’m advocating is that in that precious moment we start to make choices that lead to happiness and freedom rather than choices that lead to unnecessary suffering and the obscuration of our intelligence, our warmth, our capacity to remain open and present with the natural movement of life.”
― Pema Chödrön, Taking the Leap: Freeing Ourselves from Old Habits and Fears

“As we change our own dysfunctional habits, we are simultaneously changing society. Our own awakening is intertwined with the awakening of enlightened society. If we can lose our personal appetite for aggression and addiction, the whole planet will rejoice.”
― Pema Chödrön, Taking the Leap: Freeing Ourselves from Old Habits and Fears

“Chögyam Trungpa put it, “Sanity is permanent, neurosis is temporary.”
― Pema Chödrön, Taking the Leap: Freeing Ourselves from Old Habits and Fears

“We are never encouraged to experience the ebb and flow of our moods, of our health, of the weather, of outer events—pleasant and unpleasant—in their fullness. Instead we stay caught in a fearful, narrow holding pattern of avoiding any pain and continually seeking comfort. This is the universal dilemma.”
― Pema Chödrön, Taking the Leap: Freeing Ourselves from Old Habits and Fears

“Selfless help, helping others without an agenda, is the result of having helped ourselves. We”
― Pema Chödrön, Taking the Leap: Freeing Ourselves from Old Habits and Fears

“In Jill Bolte Taylor’s book My Stroke of Insight, she points to scientific evidence showing that the life span of any particular emotion is only one and a half minutes. After that we have to revive the emotion and get it going again.”
― Pema Chödrön, Taking the Leap: Freeing Ourselves from Old Habits and Fears

“But as my teacher Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche used to say, we can approach our lives as an experiment. In the next moment, in the next hour, we could choose to stop, to slow down, to be still for a few seconds. We could experiment with interrupting the usual chain reaction, and not spin off in the usual way. We don’t need to blame someone else, and we don’t need to blame ourselves. When we’re in a tight spot, we can experiment with not strengthening the aggression habit and see what happens. Pausing”
― Pema Chödrön, Taking the Leap: Freeing Ourselves from Old Habits and Fears

“It’s like this for all of us initially. We can contact our inner strength, our natural openness, for short periods before getting swept away. And this is excellent, heroic, a huge step in interrupting and weakening our ancient habits. If we keep a sense of humor and stay with it for the long haul, the ability to be present just naturally evolves. Gradually we lose our appetite for biting the hook. We lose our appetite for aggression. If”
― Pema Chödrön, Taking the Leap: Freeing Ourselves from Old Habits and Fears

“One of the metaphors for ego is a cocoon. We stay in our cocoon because we’re afraid—we’re afraid of our feelings and the reactions that life is going to trigger in us. We’re afraid of what might come at us. But if this avoidance strategy worked, then the Buddha wouldn’t have needed to teach anything, because our attempts to escape pain, which all living beings instinctively resort to, would result in security, happiness, and comfort, and there would be no problem. But what the Buddha observed is that self-absorption, this trying to find zones of safety, creates terrible suffering. It weakens us, the world becomes more terrifying, and our thoughts and emotions become more and more threatening as well. There”
― Pema Chödrön, Taking the Leap: Freeing Ourselves from Old Habits and Fears

“think of a time when you were angry, when someone said or did something that you didn’t like, a time when you wanted to get even or you wanted to vent. Now, what if you had been able to stop, breathe deeply, and slow the process down? Right on the spot you could connect with natural openness. You could stop, give space, and empower the wolf of patience and courage instead of the wolf of aggression and violence.”
― Pema Chödrön, Taking the Leap: Freeing Ourselves from Old Habits and Fears

“Natural warmth is our shared capacity to love, to have empathy, to have a sense of humor. It is also our capacity to feel gratitude and appreciation and tenderness. It’s the whole gamut of what often are called the heart qualities, qualities that are a natural part of being human. Natural warmth has the power to heal all relationships—the relationship with ourselves as well as with people, animals, and all that we encounter every day of our lives.”
― Pema Chödrön, Taking the Leap: Freeing Ourselves from Old Habits and Fears

“Life’s energy is never static. It is as shifting, fluid, changing as the weather. Sometimes we like how we’re feeling, sometimes we don’t. Then we like it again. Then we don’t. Happy and sad, comfortable and uncomfortable alternate continually. This is how it is for everyone. But behind our views and opinions, our hopes and fears about what’s happening, the dynamic energy of life is always here, unchanged by our reactions of like and dislike.”
― Pema Chodron, Taking the Leap: Freeing Ourselves from Old Habits and Fears

“By learning to stay, we become very familiar with this place, and gradually, gradually, it loses its threat. Instead of scratching, we stay present. We’re no longer invested in constantly trying to move away from insecurity. We think that facing our demons is reliving some traumatic event or discovering for sure that we’re worthless. But, in fact, it is just abiding with the uneasy, disquieting sensation of nowhere-to-run and finding that—guess what?—we don’t die; we don’t collapse. In fact, we feel profound relief and freedom.”
― Pema Chodron, Taking the Leap: Freeing Ourselves from Old Habits and Fears

“If right now our emotional reaction to seeing a certain person or hearing certain news is to fly into a rage or to get despondent or something equally extreme, it’s because we have been cultivating that particular habit for a very long time. But as my teacher Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche used to say, we can approach our lives as an experiment. In the next moment, in the next hour, we could choose to stop, to slow down, to be still for a few seconds. We could experiment with interrupting the usual chain reaction, and not spin off in the usual way. We don’t need to blame someone else, and we don’t need to blame ourselves. When we’re in a tight spot, we can experiment with not strengthening the aggression habit and see what happens.”
― Pema Chodron, Taking the Leap: Freeing Ourselves from Old Habits and Fears