Tag: Pema Chodron

How to relate to our daily life

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How we stay in the middle between indulging and repressing is by acknowledging whatever arises without judgment, letting the thoughts simply dissolve, and then going back to the openness of this very moment. That’s what we’re actually doing in meditation. Up come all these thoughts, but rather than squelch them or obsess with them, we acknowledge them and let them go. Then we come back to just being here.

After a while, that’s how we relate with hope and fear in our daily lives. Out of nowhere, we stop struggling and relax. We see our story line, drop it, and come back to the freshness of the present moment.

Pema Chodron, Comfortable with Uncertainty

A Brand New Day

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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.

Pema Chodron, The Wisdom of no Escape.

Patience with ourselves: Practicing without “should”

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Some of us can accept others right where they are a lot more easily than we can accept ourselves. We feel that compassion is reserved for someone else, and it never occurs to us to feel it for ourselves. My experience is,  that by practicing without “shoulds”, we gradually discover our wakefulness and our confidence. Gradually, without any agenda except to be honest and kind, we assume responsibility for being here in this unpredictable world, in this unique moment, in this precious human body.

Pema Chodron, When Things Fall Apart

More on Pausing

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If right now our emotional reaction to seeing a certain person or hearing certain news is to fly into a rage or to get despondent or something equally extreme, it’s because we have been cultivating that particular habit for a very long time. But as my teacher Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche used to say, we can approach our lives as an experiment. In the next moment, in the next hour, we could choose to stop, to slow down, to be still for a few seconds. We could experiment with interrupting the usual chain reaction, and not spin off in the usual way. We don’t need to blame someone else, and we don’t need to blame ourselves.  Pausing is very helpful in this process. It creates a momentary contrast between being completely self-absorbed and being awake and present. You just stop for a few seconds, breathe deeply, and move on. In the middle of just living, which is usually a pretty caught-up experience characterized by a lot of internal discussion, you just pause.

Pema Chodron, The Power of the Pause, O Magazine

Simple daily practices: Pause

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Our habits are strong, so a certain discipline is required to step outside our cocoon and receive the magic of our surroundings. The pause practice—the practice of taking three conscious breaths at any moment when we notice that we are stuck — is a simple but powerful practice that each of us can do at any given moment.

Pause practice can transform each day of your life. It creates an open doorway to the sacredness of the place in which you find yourself. The vastness, stillness, and magic of the place will dawn upon you, if you let your mind relax and drop for just a few breaths the storyline you are working so hard to maintain. If you pause just long enough, you can reconnect with exactly where you are, with the immediacy of your experience.

Pema Chodron, Waking up to your World

Not out of reach

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Our true nature is not some ideal that we have to live up to .

It’s who we are right now,

and that ‘s what we can make friends with and celebrate.

Pema Chodron