Pema Chodron Quotes

We get so intellectual that we forget that we're physical creatures.

I love being alive. I like being a human being.

Now and again I feel the astonishment of being alive like this, in this body.

It’s precisely because of the pain, the we can get the feeling, through this process, of really being alive—or at least a partial sense of it.

If you knew the immensity of what it means to be human, you would not talk about God or Heaven.

It makes life so much easier when you can just say 'I'm human' at the end of the day."

Do you qualify to be alive or is the limit of your senses so as to survive?

…everything has a narrative, really, and if you can’t understand a story and relate to it, figure out how you fit inside it, you’re not really alive at all.

The most wonderful opportunity which life offers is to be human.

Self-awareness includes awareness of your body.

Just because you're breathing, doesn't mean you're alive.

When we're awake in our bodies and sense, the world comes alive. Wisdom, creativity, and love are discovered as we relax and awaken through our bodies.

The character is a piece of fiction. You are yourself, however, and that makes you interesting, because you're alive and you're a human being.

Sometimes living can be hard, but it's only because we're alive that we can make each other laugh,cry... be happy! In this world, if that's not a reason for being born in this world... I don't know what is!

The Hoffman Process brings forth spiritual leadership in a person. It made my spirituality come alive. Through the Hoffman Process I actually brought my faith into my daily actions.

The very way you breathe, sit, stand, eat, walk, work - everything can become yoga. You can use any process of life to transcend your limitations.

Our lives are at once ordinary and mythical. At the same instant we have these magnificent hearts that pump through all sorrow and all winters we are alive on the earth.

My biggest fear is losing memory because memory is what we are. Your very soul and your very reason to be alive is tied up in memory.

Few of us have lost our minds, but most of us have long ago lost our bodies.

At every stage of spiritual growth, the greatest ally you have is your body.

This hobble of being alive is rather serious, don’t you think so?

The idea of suicide, understandable as it is, does not seem commendable to me. We live in order to gain the greatest possible amount of spiritual development and self-awareness. As long as life is possible, even if only in a minimal degree, you should hang onto it, in order to scoop it up for the purpose of conscious development. To interrupt life before its time is to bring to a standstill an experiment which we have not set up. We have found ourselves in the midst of it and must carry it through to the end.

The real question is not whether life exists after death. The real question is whether you are alive before death.

The Human Condition being, basically, that we’re alive and have access to beauty, can even erratically create it, but will someday be dead and will not.