When Things Fall Apart   
Pema Chodron    

Summary

How to accept life for what it is

Rating: 5/5

Notes

We all need to be reminded and encouraged to relax with whatever arises and bring whatever we encounter to the path

Fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to the truth

No one ever tells us to stop running away from fear. We are rarely told to move closer, to just be there, to become familiar with fear

The most heartbreaking thing of all is how we cheat ourselves out of the present moment

We don’t know anything. We call something bad, we call it good. But really we just don’t know.

Things are always in transition if only we could realize it

The spiritual journey makes going beyond hope and fear, stepping into unknown territory and continuing to move forward

We don’t sit in meditation to become good meditators. We sit in meditation so that we’ll be more awake in our lives

Meditation is about opening and relaxing with whatever arises, without picking and choosing

The most difficult times for many of us are the ones we give ourselves yet we need to be most compassionate and develop a love/kindness relationship with ourselves

We spend our whole lives escaping from the monster of our minds

Hope and fear is a feeling with two sides

Death and hopelessness provide proper motivation for living an insightful compassionate life

8 dharmas we get caught up in: pleasure and pain, praise and criticism, fame and disgrace, gain and losing what we have

• When we are caught up in these, we suffer

Become inquisitive about these things and understand how each of them feels

People need help and there’s no way to help anybody unless we start with ouorselves

Impermanence is the goodness of reality - it is the essence of everything

Pain and pleasure are inseparable - pain is not a punishment and pleasure is not a reward

Recognize everything in your life as impermanent

What we habitually regard as obstacles are not our enemies but our friends

We are all addicted to avoiding pain

Seeking security or perfection is some kind of death. It doesn’t have any fresh air. We are killing the moment by controlling our experience

To be fully alive and fully human is to be thrown out of the nest, to always be in no man’s land experiencing each moment as new and fresh

running away from the immediacy of our experience is like preferring death to life

Studying ourselves provides all the tools we need

Compassionate action involves working with ourselves as much as working with others

We can’t make things completely wrong or right because things are a lot more slippery and ambiguous than that

Ego is our opinions which we take to be solid, real and the absolute truth of how things are

Never give up on yourself so you never give up on others

‘Approach what you find repulsive, help the ones you think you cannot help and go to places that scare you’

The world is always displaying itself, always moving and changing but we are so self-involved that we miss it

There is no attention to the experience we have. Our experience is the only experience there is. This is the ultimate teacher

Sometimes you have to let everything just fall apart

The path is the goal

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