How To Stay Strong When Life Gets Hard – 4 Powerful Insights From Pema Chodron

Pema Chodron is a Buddhist nun, meditation teacher and best selling author. Her insights into life and spirituality are nothing short of profound and her approach to it is beautifully compassionate.

Here are 4 of her most powerful insights from her famous book When Things Fall Apart: Heartfelt Advice for Hard Times.

“The most fundamental aggression to ourselves, the most fundamental harm we can do to ourselves, is to remain ignorant by not having the courage and the respect to look at ourselves honestly and gently.”  – Pema Chodron Quotes

To take a long and honest look into our hearts takes a huge amount of courage and vulnerability. But the cost of not doing so is far greater than we could ever imagine. Where we to remain separate from ourselves for a whole life time without taking a moment to see inside, means to have lost the opportunity to love ourselves wholly, and create that which we have always desired.

“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.” – Pema Chodron Quotes

Life’s challenges have no end point. But as human beings having a spiritual experience, we tend to try to fix or solve things, so as to feel safe and comfortable again. But life is constantly going to throw disruptions our way, and we become uncomfortable only when we refuse to accept this.

“Most of us do not take these situations as teachings. We automatically hate them. We run like crazy. We use all kinds of ways to escape — all addictions stem from this moment when we meet our edge and we just can’t stand it. We feel we have to soften it, pad it with something, and we become addicted to whatever it is that seems to ease the pain.” – Pema Chodron Quotes

What we resist persists. We kick and fight at the idea that something may happen in our lives that is not to our liking. Or we avoid it totally and numb ourselves from the truth. Both of these choices serve only to remove us from the present moment and into torment. By being comfortable with being uncomfortable we can learn great insights that would have passed us by were we to have taken the other ways.

“When we protect ourselves so we won’t feel pain, that protection becomes like armour, like armour that imprisons the softness of the heart.” – Pema Chodron Quotes

Life is made to be felt. To restrict ourselves by choosing to turn away from it is the greatest tragedy that we could bestow upon ourselves. When life is challenging, embrace it, trust you are not alone and look inwards. That is where your salvation lies.

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