pema chodron when things fall apart quotes

Addicted to Happiness and Aversion to Suffering (EMBRACE).

Top 10 Most Famous Pema Chödrön Quotes (Best).

Like the tides of the sea, like day and night - this is the nature of things. After we have died, the ebb and flow will still continue. Cutting our expectations for a cure is a gift we can give ourselves. When we worry because the wind is shaking our windows, we could meet the wind and hear its sound. When we want to complain about the rain, we could feel its wetness instead. When we feel resentment because the room is too cold, we could meet the cold and feel its iciness and its bite. When we feel resentment because the room is too hot, we could meet the heat and feel its fieriness and its heaviness.

The way to dissolve our resistance to life is to meet it face to face. From the awakened point of view, that's life. To live is to be willing to die over and over again. To live fully is to be always in no-man's-land, to experience each moment as completely new and fresh. To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. There is something aggressive about that approach to life, trying to flatten out all the rough spots and imperfections into a nice smooth ride. From an awakened perspective, trying to tie up all the loose ends and finally get it together is death, because it involves rejecting a lot of your basic experience. Sometimes you have a headache, and sometimes you feel 100 percent healthy. Sometimes your body tenses, and sometimes it relaxes or opens. Sometimes it is sweet, and sometimes it is bitter. The essence of life is that it's challenging. Doing this is setting ourselves up for failure, because sooner or later, we're going to have an experience we can't control: our house is going to burn down, someone we love is going to die, we're going to find out we have cancer, a brick is going to fall out of the sky and hit us on the head, somebody's going to spill tomato juice all over our white suit, or we're going to arrive at our favorite restaurant and discover that no one ordered produce and seven hundred people are coming for lunch. We are killing the moment by controlling our experience. There's no room for something to come in and interrupt all that. Seeking security or perfection, rejoicing in feeling confirmed and whole, self-contained and comfortable, is some kind of death.

But from the point of view of someone who is awake, that's death. We think that if we just meditated enough or jogged enough or ate perfect food, everything would be perfect.

Pema chodron when things fall apart quotes