Next, feel your heart, literally placing your hand on your chest if you find that helpful. This is a way of accepting yourself just as you are in that moment, a way of saying, "This is my experience right now, and it's okay." Then go into the next moment without any agenda.

Pema Chodron

Be kinder to yourself. And then let your kindness flood the world.

Pema Chodron

flood kindness world

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

Pema Chodron

suffering struggle letting-go

Although it is embarrassing and painful, it is very healing to stop hiding from yourself. It is healing to know all the ways that you’re sneaky, all the ways that you hide out, all the ways that you shut down, deny, close off, criticize people, all your weird little ways. You can know all of that with some sense of humor and kindness. By knowing yourself, you’re coming to know humanness altogether. We are all up against these things. We are all in this together.

Pema Chodron

knowing healing kindness

Loving kindness towards ourselves doesn't mean getting rid of anything. It means we can still be crazy after all these years. We can still be angry after all these years. We can still be timid or jealous or full of feelings of unworthiness. The point is not to try to throw ourselves away and become something better. It's about befriending who we are already.

Pema Chodron

jealous crazy kindness

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

Pema Chodron

learning spiritual life

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

Pema Chodron

encouraging change spiritual

The peace that we are looking for is not peace that crumbles as soon as there is difficulty or chaos. Whether we’re seeking inner peace or global peace or a combination of the two, the way to experience it is to build on the foundation of unconditional openness to all that arises. Peace isn’t an experience free of challenges, free of rough and smooth, it’s an experience that’s expansive enough to include all that arises without feeling threatened.

Pema Chodron

inner-peace challenges two

Difficult things provoke all your irritations and bring your habitual patterns to the surface. And that becomes the moment of truth. 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.

Pema Chodron

rawness irritation choices

Usually we think that brave people have no fear. The truth is that they are intimate with fear.

Pema Chodron

brave people thinking

You are the sky. Everything else - it’s just the weather.

Pema Chodron

rainy-day uplifting sky

It isn't the things that are happening to us that cause us to suffer, it's what we say to ourselves about the things that are happening. The truth you believe and cling to makes you unavailable to hear anything new.

Pema Chodron

causes suffering believe

Anything we experience, no matter how challenging, can become an open pathway to awakening.

Pema Chodron

awakening challenges matter

Treat yourself as your own beloved child.

Pema Chodron

treats beloved children

So many of us start along the spiritual path because we are suffering. But you must realize that for real healing to occur, there must first be deep compassion for yourself, especially the parts of yourself you dislike or consider ugly.

Pema Chodron

real spiritual healing

Feel the wounded heart that's underneath the addiction, self-loathing, or anger.

Pema Chodron

addiction self heart

Feel the feelings and drop the story.

Pema Chodron

stories feelings feels

All situations teach you, and often it's the tough ones that teach you best.

Pema Chodron

teach situation tough

The truth you believe and cling to makes you unavailable to hear anything new.

Pema Chodron

spiritual happiness peace

We can let the circumstances of our lives harden us so that we become increasingly resentful and afraid, or we can let them soften us and make us kinder and more open to what scares us. We always have this choice.

Pema Chodron

scare choices circumstances

The best spiritual instruction is when you wake up in the morning and say, 'I wonder what's going to happen today.' And then carry that kind of curiosity through your life.

Pema Chodron

curiosity spiritual morning