67 Pema Chödrön Quotes on Mindfulness and Compassion
Explore Pema Chödrön quotes on mindfulness, compassion, and inner peace. Find wisdom to embrace life’s challenges, cultivate resilience, and live with grace.
Pema Chödrön, a renowned American-born Tibetan Buddhist nun and spiritual teacher, has inspired countless individuals with her teachings on mindfulness, compassion, and the path to inner peace. Through her books, talks, and teachings, she encourages people to embrace life’s challenges with openness and grace, seeing obstacles as opportunities for growth. Her quotes are a gentle reminder of the power of acceptance, self-compassion, and living fully in the present moment. In this collection of Pema Chödrön quotes, we explore her profound wisdom that helps cultivate resilience, emotional freedom, and a deeper connection to ourselves and others.
Pema Chödrön Quotes
- “Be kinder to yourself and then let your kindness flood the world.” ~ Pema Chödrön
- “Pain is not a punishment; pleasure is not a reward.” ~ Pema Chödrön
- “The most difficult times for many of us are the ones we give ourselves.” ~ Pema Chödrön
- “If we learn to open our hearts, anyone, including the people who drive us crazy, can be our teacher.” ~ Pema Chödrön
- “We work on ourselves in order to help others, but also we help others in order to work on ourselves.” ~ Pema Chödrön
- “Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift.” ~ Pema Chödrön
- “Don’t let people pull you into their storm. Pull them into your peace.” ~ Pema Chödrön
- “The ego seeks to divide and separate. Spirit seeks to unify and heal.” ~ Pema Chödrön
- “When you begin to touch your heart or let your heart be touched, you begin to discover that it’s bottomless.” ~ Pema Chödrön
- “True compassion does not come from wanting to help out those less fortunate than ourselves but from realizing our kinship with all beings.” ~ Pema Chödrön
Best Pema Chödrön Quotes
- “As long as our orientation is toward perfection or success, we will never learn about unconditional friendship with ourselves, nor will we find compassion.” ~ Pema Chödrön
- “There’s no way to benefit anybody unless we start with ourselves.” ~ Pema Chödrön
- “It’s a nice feeling to just be.” ~ Pema Chödrön
- “Lower your standards and relax as it is.” ~ Pema Chödrön
- “We are one blink away from being fully awake.” ~ Pema Chödrön
- “The happiness we seek is already here and it will be found through letting go rather than through struggle.” ~ Pema Chödrön
- “To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-man’s land, to experience each moment as completely new and fresh. To live is to be willing to die over and over again.” ~ Pema Chödrön
- “Inner peace begins the moment you choose not to allow another person or event to control your emotions.” ~ Pema Chödrön
- “If we’re willing to give up hope that insecurity and pain can be exterminated, then we can have the courage to relax with the groundlessness of our situation.” ~ Pema Chödrön
- “Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible in us be found.” ~ Pema Chödrön
Inspirational Pema Chödrön Quotes
- “This very moment is the perfect teacher, and lucky for us, it’s with us wherever we go.” ~ Pema Chödrön
- “Appreciate everything, even the ordinary. Especially the ordinary.” ~ Pema Chödrön
- “The future is completely open, and we are writing it moment to moment.” ~ Pema Chödrön
- “Don’t let life harden your heart.” ~ Pema Chödrön
- “Be curious. Welcome groundlessness. Lighten up and relax. Offer chaos a cup of tea.” ~ Pema Chödrön
- “You are the sky. Everything else – it’s just the weather.” ~ Pema Chödrön
- “The present moment is our doorway to liberation.” ~ Pema Chödrön
- “Fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to the truth.” ~ Pema Chödrön
- “There’s no certainty about anything. This basic truth hurts, and we want to run away from it.” ~ Pema Chödrön
- “Compassion becomes real when we recognize our shared humanity.” ~ Pema Chödrön
Quotes by Pema Chödrön
- “Don’t worry about achieving. Don’t worry about perfection. Just be there each moment as best you can.” ~ Pema Chödrön
- “Thinking that we can find some lasting pleasure and avoid pain is what in Buddhism is called samsara, a hopeless cycle that goes round and round endlessly and causes us to suffer greatly.” ~ Pema Chödrön
- “Without giving up hope – that there’s somewhere better to be, that there’s someone better to be – we will never relax with where we are or who we are.” ~ Pema Chödrön
- “One of the deepest habitual patterns that we have is to feel that now is not good enough.” ~ Pema Chödrön
- “It isn’t what happens to us that causes us to suffer; it’s what we say to ourselves about what happens.” ~ Pema Chödrön
- “Patience means allowing things to unfold at their own speed rather than jumping in with your habitual response to either pain or pleasure.” ~ Pema Chödrön
- “When we feel lonely, when we feel hopeless, what we want to do is move to the right or to the left. We don’t want to sit and feel what we feel. We don’t want to go through the detox.” ~ Pema Chödrön
- “So, the next time you encounter fear, consider yourself lucky. This is where the courage comes in. Usually, we think that brave people have no fear. The truth is that they are intimate with fear.” ~ Pema Chödrön
- “The stronger our fixed identity of ourselves is, the easier we are insulted.” ~ Pema Chödrön
- “The greatest obstacle to connecting with our joy is resentment.” ~ Pema Chödrön
Famous Pema Chödrön Quotes
- “Rather than letting our negativity get the better of us, we could acknowledge that right now we feel like a piece of shit and not be squeamish about taking a good look.” ~ Pema Chödrön
- “Healing comes from letting there be room for everything: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.” ~ Pema Chödrön
- “Knowing pain is a very important ingredient of being there for another person.” ~ Pema Chödrön
- “Scrambling for security has never brought anything but momentary joy.” ~ Pema Chödrön
- “The truth you believe and cling to makes you unavailable to hear anything new.” ~ Pema Chödrön
- “Life is glorious but life is also wretched. It is both.” ~ Pema Chödrön
- “Life has taught me the wisdom of moving toward what scares me.” ~ Pema Chödrön
- “The antidote to misery is to stay present.” ~ Pema Chödrön
- “If you’re invested in security and certainty, you are on the wrong planet.” ~ Pema Chödrön
- “When the resistance is gone, so are the demons.” ~ Pema Chödrön
Pema Chödrön Quote
- “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.” ~ Pema Chödrön
- “Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know.” ~ Pema Chödrön
- “Interrupting our destructive habits and awakening our heart is the work of a lifetime.” ~ Pema Chödrön
- “We can gradually drop our ideals of who we think we ought to be… or who we think other people think we want to be or ought to be.” ~ Pema Chödrön
- “That nothing is static or fixed, that all is fleeting and impermanent, is the first mark of existence.” ~ Pema Chödrön
- “Let your curiosity be greater than your fear.” ~ Pema Chödrön
- “When I didn’t resist, I could see the world.” ~ Pema Chödrön
- “If it weren’t for my mind, my meditation would be excellent.” ~ Pema Chödrön
- “Meditation practice isn’t about trying to throw ourselves away and become something better. It’s about befriending who we are already.” ~ Pema Chödrön
- “Clarity and decisiveness come from the willingness to slow down, to listen and look at what’s happening.” ~ Pema Chödrön
Pema Chödrön Quotes on Meditation
- “If you ask why we meditate, I would say it’s so we can become more flexible and tolerant to the present moment.” ~ Pema Chödrön
- “It helps to remember that our practice is not about accomplishing anything — not about winning or losing — but about ceasing to struggle and relaxing as it is. That is what we are doing when we sit down to meditate.” ~ Pema Chödrön
- “In practicing meditation, we’re not trying to live up to some kind of ideal — quite the opposite. We’re just being with our experience, whatever it is.” ~ Pema Chödrön
- “Meditation takes us just as we are, with our confusion and our sanity. This complete acceptance of ourselves as we are called maitri, or unconditional friendliness, a simple, direct relationship with the way we are.” ~ Pema Chödrön
- “Meditation teaches us how to relate to life directly, so we can truly experience the present moment, free from conceptual overlay.” ~ Pema Chödrön
- “We don’t sit in meditation to become good meditators. We sit in meditation so that we’ll become more awake in our lives.” ~ Pema Chödrön
- “One of the main discoveries of meditation is seeing how we continually run away from the present moment, how we avoid being here just as we are.” ~ Pema Chödrön
Thank you for reading this. Which are your favorite Pema Chödrön quotes that inspire you? Please add your much loved quotes in comments section; we will include them in this post.
If you liked this article on Pema Chödrön Quotes, please share on your favorite social media portals with your friends and relatives.
