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"Many religions have meditations on death to let it penetrate our thick skulls that life doesn't last forever."
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"Two things influence one's wisdom: remarkable experience and " evenmuch more " accumulated knowledge."
"Yet Byron never made tea as you do, who fill the pot so that when you put the lid on the tea spills over. There is a brown pool on the table-it is running among your books and papers. Now you mop it up, clumsily, with your pocket-hankerchief. You then stuff your hankerchief back into your pocket-that is not Byron; that is so essentially you that if I think of you in twenty years' time, when we are both famous, gouty and intolerable, it will be by that scene: and if you are dead, I shall weep."
"Simple minded people do things like gossip, lie, spread rumors, and cause troubles. But, I know you're more intelligent."
"There is no saint here. I have attained wisdom from life's experiences... the positive, the negative, the destructive, the nourishing. I have been medicine and I have been poison. I've learned a lot about heaven from aligning with angels and I learned a lot about hell from acting like a devil. I offer my scars... what you call "wisdom"... as insight I have gathered from my comfort of living within both the light and the shadow."
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."
"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."
"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."
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