quotes pema chodron when things fall apart

What you do for yourself, any gesture of kindness, any gesture of gentleness, any gesture of honesty and clear seeing toward yourself, will affect how you experience your world.It is always available, always waiting to be discovered. Deep down in the human spirit, there is a reservoir of courage.And then let your kindness flood the world. Compassion becomes real when we recognize our shared humanity. Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others. Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded.It isn’t what happens to us that causes us to suffer it’s what we say to ourselves about what happens.You have the choice to launch into your lousy habitual patterns or to stay with the rawness and discomfort of the situation and let it transform you. Difficult things provoke all your irritations and bring your habitual patterns to the surface.It’s about befriending who we are already. The point is not to try to throw ourselves away and become something better. We can still be timid or jealous or full of feelings of unworthiness. We can still be angry after all these years.

It means we can still be crazy after all these years.

Loving-kindness towards ourselves doesn’t mean getting rid of anything.

Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know.

This is priceless advice that addresses the true cause of suffering-yours, mine, and that of all living beings. 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.

The next time you lose heart and you can’t bear to experience what you’re feeling, you might recall this instruction: change the way you see it and lean in.

Quotes pema chodron when things fall apart