Pema Chodron Quotes

You had a choice: you could either strain and look at things that appeared in front of you in the fog, painful as it might be, or you could relax and lose yourself

Chill out, relax and have an open mind.

We are always in transition. If you can just relax with that, you'll have no problem.

It's your choice, what you do with the moment. If you're stuck in a traffic jam, you can get angry and honk your horn, or listen to Mozart. But when you have a very specific expectation of how things should be, then, of course, you end up hurting yourself.

Acceptance means focusing on the present while assessing the choices available to you in this moment. If there are many possibilities, make the choice that is likely to bring the most evolutionary results. If there is only one choice, take it. If there are no obvious choices, relax and accept the fact that for now, you cannot do anything.

Lower your standards and relax as it is.

The more choices you have--the more options you have, the better off you are.

When you have tough times, and when you learn you can't be perfect in every situation, it's hard to accept, you know, because I still do expect that. But you just have to, because, you know, it's not about the situation. It's how you deal with it. You always have a choice.

Come back to square one, just the minimum bare bones. Relaxing with the present moment, relaxing with hopelessness, relaxing with death, not resisting the fact that things end, that things pass, that things have no lasting substance, that everything is changing all the time-that is the basic message.

You don't need to suffer anymore. You've suffered enough to take you to this point where you hear the words, "You don't need to suffer anymore," and you understand them. You recognize their truth and you then see that you do have a choice ­ that you can surrender to the suchness of now, which means every moment to relinquish resistance and if it still arises, to recognize it.

Don't seek, don't search, don't ask, don't knock, don't demand - relax.

If we can learn to deal with our discomfort and just relax into it we'll have a better life.

Once we see that everything is impermanent and ungraspable and that we create a huge amount of suffering if we are attached to things staying the same, we realize that relaxing and letting go is a wiser way to live. Letting go does not mean not caring about things. It means caring about them in a flexible and wise way.

Letting go of our ideas about how life should go is a choice that sets life's magic free.

When we resist change, it’s called suffering. But when we can completely let go and not struggle against it, when we can embrace the groundlessness of our situation and relax into it’s dynamic quality, that’s called enlightenment

Be patient, do nothing, cease striving. We find this advice disheartening and therefore unfeasible because we forget it is our own inflexible activity that is structuring the reality. We think that if we do not hustle, nothing will happen and we will pine away. But the reality is probably in motion and after a while we might take part in that motion. But one can't know.

Do your best and then relax. Let things go on in a natural way, rather than force them.

You are very easily exasperated, my dear. If you're a leaf trembling on a wide, deep river, relax and ride the current. It's always worked for me, I assure you.

So I just decided to relax into it, bumpy and crazy as it might be, and try for once to just go along for the ride.

The man of control lives in choice, and the man of understanding lives in choicelessness.

When you are waiting for a train, don't keep perpetually looking to see if it is coming. The time of its arrival is the business of the conductor, not yours. It will not come any sooner for all your nervous glances and your impatient pacing, and you will save strength if you will keep quiet. After we discover that the people who sit still on a long railroad journey reach that journey's end at precisely the same time as those who "fuss" continually, we have a valuable piece of information which we should not fail to put to practical use.

Just relax. When I was younger, I made myself the victim of catastrophic thinking. Anything that went wrong was the end of the world. But as I've gotten older, I've learned to stop myself and say, 'Hey babe, calm down. Tomorrow there will be sun.'

It’s much easier not to know things sometimes. And to have french fries with your mom be enough.

The resistance to the unpleasant situation is the root of suffering.

Accepting means you allow yourself to feel whatever it is you are feeling at that moment. It is part of the isness of the Now. You can't argue with what is. Well, you can, but if you do, you suffer.