Pema Chodron Quotes

With the practice of meditation we can develop this ability to more fully love ourselves and to more consistently love others.

Meditation means: put the mind aside and watch. The first step - LOVE YOURSELF - will help you tremendously. By loving yourself you will have destroyed much that society has implanted within you. You will have become freer from the society and its conditioning.

If you just sit and spend time with yourself - you were born as you, just you, and that's how you're gonna die. Why do we spend the time in between trying to not be ourselves? That's what meditation is. You just sit with yourself. Through all of it. It's like John Patrick Shanley said: "Where the terror is, you must go." Where the terror is, is where you must go.

The mantra that you're given in Transcendental Meditation you keep to yourself. The reason being, true happiness is not out there, true happiness lies within.

Self-Realization Fellowship seemed like training. It was the training ground for finding a sense of peace in myself. Because that's my job. It's no one else's.

Getting in touch with your true self must be your first priority.

I think the most important thing in life is self-love, because if you don't have self-love, and respect for everything about your own body, your own soul, your own capsule, then how can you have an authentic relationship with anyone else?

Self-care is so much more than a beauty regimen or an external thing you do. It has to start within your heart to know what you need to navigate your life. A pedicure doesn't last, but meditating every day does.

Living, breathing, and being present is the practice that can lead us to having a full and authentic in-the-body experience. If we can shift our perspective from being separate to being part of it all, psychological hang-ups, insecurities, fears, and disorders dissolve.

Yoga is not about the history of yoga. Yoga is not about being in a sacred community of the initiated few. Yoga is about uniting inward, which takes place in the present, not the past, in each and every moment.

I was constantly looking for things outside of myself to make me feel good, and I think now that feeling can come from the inside, and that's why I meditate now twice a day.

Don't put so much pressure on yourself. Be happy with who you are and know that being you is the best thing you can do for yourself. You've got a long time to figure everything out and there's no rush. Enjoy the now.

There isn't anything except your own life that can be used as ground for your spiritual practice. Spiritual practice is your life, twenty-four hours a day.

You need to build an ability to just be yourself, and not be doing something.

When we practice metta, we open continuously to the truth of our actual experience, changing our relationship to life.

The real 'work' of prayer is to become silent and listen to the voice that says good things about me.

Meditation practice is a way of making friends with ourselves. Whether we are worthy or unworthy, that's not the point. It's developing a friendly attitude to ourselves, accepting the hidden neurosis coming through.

Meditation is not about getting out of ourselves or achieving something better. It is about getting in touch with what you already are.

Our wisdom is all mixed up with what we call our neurosis. Our brilliance, our juiciness, our spiciness, is all mixed up with our craziness and our confusion, and therefore it doesn’t do any good to try to get rid of our so-called negative aspects, because in that process we also get rid of our basic wonderfulness. We can lead our life so as to become more awake to who we are and what we’re doing rather than trying to improve or change or get rid of who we are or what we’re doing. The key is to wake up, to become more alert, more inquisitive and curious about ourselves.

What keeps me going is that quest for just being able to be present and be myself. Not for people, but for me.

I crave time in all its duration, and I want to be myself unconditionally.

I can't overestimate the importance of accepting ourselves exactly as we are right now, not as we wish we were or think we ought to be.

Practice can be stated very simply. It is moving from a life of hurting myself and others to a life of not hurting myself and others. That seems so simple-except when we substitute for real practice some idea that we should be different or better than we are, or that our lives should be different from the way they are. When we substitute our ideas about what should be (such notions as "I should not be angry or confused or unwilling") for our life as it truly is, then we're off base and our practice is barren.

Meditation is another dimension of natural beauty. People talk about appreciating natural beauty-climbing mountains, seeing giraffes and tigers in Africa, and all sorts of things. But nobody seems to appreciate this kind of natural beauty of ourselves. This is actually far more beautiful than flora and fauna, far more fantastic, far more painful and colorful and delightful.

As we practice meditation we are bringing forth ease, presence, compassion, wisdom & trust.