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Women's History

Pema Chodron Quotes

From Jone Johnson Lewis,
Your Guide to Women's History.
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Pema Chodron (1936 - )

Ane Pema Chodron, a Tibetan Buddhist teacher, was born Deirdre Blomfield-Brown. She studied Buddhism in the
French Alps and London, where she was ordained. She worked with Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche from 1974 until 1987.
She was ordained in the Chinese lineage of Buddhism in 1981 in Hong Kong. Since 1984 she served as the director of
Gampo Abbey in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. She has taught lectured widely and has written several books on meditation
practice in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition.

Selected Pema Chodron Quotations

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

• We work on ourselves in order to help others, but also we help others in order to work on ourselves.

• When we start out on a spiritual path we often have ideals we think we're supposed to live up to. We feel we're
supposed to be better than we are in some way. But with this practice you take yourself completely as you are. Then
ironically, taking in pain - breathing it in for yourself and all others in the same boat as you are - heightens your
awareness of exactly where you're stuck.

• If we learn to open our hearts, anyone, including the people who drive us crazy, can be our teacher.

• There's a reason you can learn from everything: you have basic wisdom, basic intelligence, and basic goodness.

• Compassionate action starts with seeing yourself when you start to make yourself right and when you start to make
yourself wrong. At that point you could just contemplate the fact that there is a larger alternative to either of those, a more
tender, shaky kind of place where you could live. - In the Gap Between Right and Wrong

• We habitually erect a barrier called blame that keeps us from communicating genuinely with others, and we fortify it with
our concepts of who's right and who's wrong. We do that with the people who are closest to us and we do it with political
systems, with all kinds of things that we don't like about our associates or our society. It is a very common, ancient,
well-perfected device for trying to feel better. Blame others. Blaming is a way to protect your heart, trying to protect what
is soft and open and tender in yourself. Rather than own that pain, we scramble to find some comfortable ground. - In the
Gap Between Right and Wrong

• When you begin to touch your heart or let your heart be touched, you begin to discover that it's bottomless, that it
doesn't have any resolution, that this heart is huge, vast, and limitless. You begin to discover how much warmth and
gentleness is there, as well as how much space.

• A further sign of health is that we don't become undone by fear and trembling, but we take it as a message that it's time
to stop struggling and look directly at what's threatening us.

• Gloriousness and wretchedness need each other. One inspires us, the other softens us.

• People get into a heavy-duty sin and guilt trip, feeling that if things are going wrong, that means that they did something
bad and they are being punished. That's not the idea at all. The idea of karma is that you continually get the teachings
that you need to open your heart. To the degree that you didn't understand in the past how to stop protecting your soft
spot, how to stop armoring your heart, you're given this gift of teachings in the form of your life, to give you everything you
need to open further.

Related:

Women and Buddhism

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About These Quotes

Quote collection assembled by Jone Johnson Lewis. Each quotation page in this collection and the entire collection ©
Jone Johnson Lewis 1997-2005. This is an informal collection assembled over many years. I regret that I am not be able
to provide the original source if it is not listed with the quote.

Citation information:
Jone Johnson Lewis. "Pema Chodron Quotes." About Women's History. URL:
http://womenshistory.about.com/cs/quotes/pema_chodron.htm . Date accessed: (today). (More on how to cite online
sources including this page)

2 of 2 6/15/2007 2:41 PM