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"Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don't really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It's just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy."
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"A kind gesture can reach a wound that only compassion can heal."

"Bitterness and resentment are a bottomless well. They can only be healed by the phenomenon of someone else's sorrow rising to your level of pain... it never happens - save yourself endless hurt."

"[I] don't think I was trying to kill myself. I just wanted to hurt, and understand exactly whay I was hurting. This made sense: you cut, you felt pain, period."

"Listen to God with a broken heart. He is not only the doctor who mends it, but also the father who wipes away the tears."

"Forgiving isn't something you do for someone else. It's something you do for yourself. It's saying, 'You're not important enough to have a stranglehold on me.' It's saying, 'You don't get to trap me in the past. I am worthy of a future."

"Grief is a curious thing, when it happens unexpectedly. It is a Band-Aidbeing ripped away, taking the top layer off a family. And the underbellyof a household is never pretty, ours no exception. There were times Istayed in my room for days on end with headphones on, if only so that Iwould not have to listen to my mother cry. There were the weeks that myfather worked round-the-clock shifts, so that he wouldn't have to comehome to a house that felt too big for us."
Explore more quotes by Pema Chodron

"Making good use of our limited time - the limited time from birth to death, as well as our limited time each day - is the key to developing inner steadiness and calm."

"Without giving up hope-that there's somewhere better to be, that there's someone better to be-we will never relax with where we are or who we are."

"Many religions have meditations on death to let it penetrate our thick skulls that life doesn't last forever."

"We think that if we just meditated enough or jogged enough or ate perfect food, everything would be perfect. But from the point of view of someone who is awake, that's death. Seeking security or perfection, rejoicing in feeling confirmed and whole, self contained and comfortable, is some kind of death. It doesn't have any fresh air. There's no room for something to come in and interrupt all that. We are killing the moment by controlling our experience."

"In order to work with difficult outer circumstances, we need to gather our inner strength. If even ten or twenty minutes of meditation a day helps us to do this, let's go for it!"

"Yesterday I talked about cultivating precision, gentleness, and openess, and described how the meditation technique helps us to remember the qualities that we already possess."

"When one of the emperors of China asked Bodhidharma (the Zen master who brought Zen from India to China) what enlightenment was, his answer was, 'Lots of space, nothing holy. Meditation is nothing holy. Therefore there's nothing that you think or feel that somehow gets put in the category of 'sin. There's nothing that you can think or feel that gets put in the category of 'bad. There's nothing that you can think or feel that gets put in the category of 'wrong. It's all good juicy stuff-the manure of waking up, the manure of achieving enlightenment, the art of living in the present moment."

"There's more to liberation than trying to avoid discomfort, more to lasting happiness than pursuing temporary pleasures, temporary relief."
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