Pema Chodron

Kindness to ourselves

We are all in this together. So when you realize that you're talking to yourself, label it "thinking" and notice your tone of voice. Let it be compassionate and gentle and humorous. Then you'll be changing old stuck patterns that are shared by the whole human race. Compassion for others begins with kindness to ourselves.

Beginning to cherish the preciousness of our whole life just as it is

In our most ordinary days we have moments of happiness, moments of comfort and enjoyment, moments of seeing something that pleased us, something that touched us, moments of contacting the tenderness of our hearts... It's essential during the day ... to begin to cherish those moments as precious. Gradually we can begin to cherish the preciousness of our whole life just as it is, with its ups and downs, its failures and successes, its roughness and smoothness.

The whole movement was based on love

I was recently rereading the writings of Martin Luther King, Jr., and I understood once again that the whole movement was based on love--love that doesn't exclude anybody. . . when you take that view and you begin to live by it, something begins to shift very dramatically and you begin to see things in a different way. You begin to have the clarity to see injustice happening, but you can also see that injustice, by its very definition, is harming everybody involved. It's harming the people who are being oppressed or abused, and it's harming those who are oppressing and abusing.

The sun has only one day

The Navajo teach their children that every morning when the sun comes up, it's a brand new sun. It's born each morning, it lives for the duration of one day, and in the evening it passes on, never to return again. As soon as the children are old enough to understand, the adults take them out at dawn and they say, "The sun has only one day. You must live this day in a good way, so that the sun won't have wasted precious time." Acknowledging the preciousness of each day is a good way to live, a good way to reconnect with our basic joy.

We have to be brave enough to soften what is rigid, to find the soft spot

To the degree that each of us is dedicated to wanting there to be peace in the world, then we have to take responsibility when our own hearts and minds harden and close. We have to be brave enough to soften what is rigid, to find the soft spot and play with it. We have to have that kind of courage and take that kind of responsibility. That's the true practice of peace.

Compassionate relationships

In order to have compassionate relationships, compassionate communication and compassionate social action, there has to be a fundamental change of attitude... The basis of any real kind of compassionate action is the insight that the others who seem to be out there are some kind of mirror image of ourselves. By hurting others, you hurt yourself. By making friends with yourself, you make friends with others.

A joyful mind

A joyful mind is very ordinary and relaxed... When your aspiration is to lighten up, you begin to have a sense of humor. Things just keep popping your serious state of mind. In addition to a sense of humor, a basic support for a joyful mind is curiosity, paying attention, taking an interest in the world around you... Noticing everything. Appreciate everything, including the ordinary. That's how to click in with JOYfulness.

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