When Things Fall Apart Pema Quotes & Sayings

Laziness is not particularly terrible or wonderful. Rather it has a basic living quality that deserves to be experienced just as it is. Perhaps we'll find an irritating, pulsating quality in laziness. We might feel it as dull and heavy or as vulnerable and raw. Whatever we discover, as we explore it further, we find nothing to hold on to, nothing solid, only groundless, wakeful energy.
This process of experiencing laziness directly and nonverbally is transformative. It unlocks a tremendous energy that is usually blocked by our habit of running away. This is because when we stop resisting laziness, our identity as the one who is lazy begins to fall apart completely. Without the blinders of ego, we connect with a fresh outlook, a greater vision. This is how laziness - or any other demon - introduces us to the compassionate life. — Pema Chodron

When Things Fall Apart" and I quote "Life is a good teacher and a good friend. Things are always in transition, if we could only realize it. Nothing ever sums itself up in the way that we like to dream about. The off-center, in-between state is an ideal situation, a situation in which we don't get caught and we can open our hearts and minds beyond limit. It's a very tender, nonaggressive, open-ended state of affairs. — Pema Chodron

Sometimes you just have to let everything fall apart. — Pema Chodron

Love. Buddha nature. Courage. These are code words for things we don't know in our minds, but any of us could experience them. These are words that point to what life really is when we let things fall apart and let ourselves be nailed to the present moment. — Pema Chodron

Bad memories can attach themselves like barnacles to the hulls of our lives. And, like barnacles, they have a disproportionately large amount of drag. — Richard Paul Evans

Assimilation is really a psychological process where you come to identify with a new country as yours. The ease of overseas travel and information access interferes with that. — Mark Krikorian

I am Jack's broken heart. — Chuck Palahniuk

We are not striving to make pain go away or to become a better person. In fact, we are giving up control altogether and letting concepts and ideals fall apart. This starts with realizing that whatever occurs is neither the beginning nor the end. It is just the same kind of normal human experience that's been happening to everyday people from the beginning of time. — Pema Chodron

When we reach our limit, if we aspire to know that place fully - which is to say that we aspire to neither indulge nor repress - a hardness in us will dissolve. We will be softened by the sheer force of whatever energy arises - the energy of anger, the energy of disappointment, the energy of fear. When it's not solidified in one direction or another, that very energy pierces us to the heart, and it opens us. This is the discovery of egolessness. It's when all our usual schemes fall apart. Reaching our limit is like finding a doorway to sanity and the unconditional goodness of humanity, rather than meeting an obstacle or a punishment. — Pema Chodron

It's a transformative experience to simply pause instead of immediately fill up the space. By waiting, we begin to connect with fundamental restlessness as well as fundamental spaciousness.
-Pema Chodron, from When Things Fall Apart — Pema Chodron

We think that the point is to pass the test or 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. (10) — Pema Chodron

You're the only one who knows when you're using things to protect yourself and keep your ego together and when you're opening and letting things fall apart, letting the world come as it is - working with it rather than struggling against it. You're the only one who knows. — Pema Chodron

But as we let go of our repetitive stories and fixed ideas about ourselves
particularly deep-seated feelings of "I'm not okay"
the armor starts to fall apart, and we open into the spaciousness of our true nature, into who we really are beyond the transitory thoughts and emotions. We see that our armor is made up of nothing more than habits and fears, and we begin to feel that we can let those go. — Pema Chodron

She's the gristle stuck between Time's teeth, and I love her for it. — Shaun David Hutchinson

Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know
... nothing ever really attacks us except our own confusion. perhaps there is no solid obstacle except our own need to protect ourselves from being touched. maybe the only enemy is that we don't like the way reality is now and therefore wish it would go away fast. but what we find as practitioners is that nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know. if we run a hundred miles an hour to the other end of the continent in order to get away from the obstacle, we find the very same problem waiting for us when we arrive. it just keeps returning with new names, forms, manifestations until we learn whatever it has to teach us about where we are separating ourselves from reality, how we are pulling back instead of opening up, closing down instead of allowing ourselves to experience fully whatever we encounter, without hesitating or retreating into ourselves. — Pema Chodron

Give every man thine ear, but few thy voice; Take each man's censure, but reserve thy judgment. — William Shakespeare

It may be that Japanese culture is not ego-based like Western culture: argument has often a strong ego base. The most likely explanation is that Japanese culture was not influenced by those Greek thinking idioms which were refined and developed by medieval monks as a means of proving heretics to be wrong. (p36) — Edward De Bono

Some are born old maids, some achieve old maidenhood, and some have old maidenhood thrust upon them , parodied Miss Lavendar whimsically. — L.M. Montgomery

Hawk?
He gazed up at her, still crouched on the floor, ready to pounce if she so much as moved an inch. — Karen Marie Moning

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. — Pema Chodron

When things fall apart and we can't get the pieces back together, when we lose something dear to us, when they whole thing is just not working and we don't know what to do, this is the time when the natural warmth of tenderness, the warmth of empathy and kindness, are just waiting to be uncovered, just waiting to be embraced. This is our chance to come out of our self-protecting bubble and to realize that we are never alone. This is our chance to finally understand that wherever we go, everyone we meet is essentially just like us. Our own suffering, if we turn toward it, can open us to a loving relationship with the world. — Pema Chodron

And that's what's beautiful to me, is he did not become a victim of it, and he didn't become a statistic, he just kind of kept on marching through, no matter what people threw at him. — Mary Stuart Masterson

I believe that the government that governs best is a government that governs least, and by these standards we have set up a fabulous government in Iraq. — Stephen Colbert