This is a curated selection of Pema Chödrön quotes (primarily sourced from publicly available videos, and personally curated by me on my own lifelong learning journey). This page is intended as a learning resource for educational purposes and only meant to offer an overview/introduction. Short quotes aren’t a substitute for source material, so if this page sparks your interest, explore more deeply by checking out Pema Chödrön’s books (Amazon).
Page Contents:
- Suffering & Happiness Quotes
- Awakening & Awakeness Quotes
- Presence & Uncertainty Quotes
- Breathing & Meditating Quotes
25 Pema Chödrön Quotes on Suffering, Awakening, Meditating, & More
Pema Chödrön Quotes on Suffering & Happiness
“Crisis, trauma, a lot of pain of some kind—people who have this are usually the ones who get really serious about the spiritual path and are highly motivated to learn to stay. It’s a blessing in disguise; I think a lot of the spiritual path is about blessings in disguise.” — Pema Chödrön
“It isn’t the things that happen to us in our lives that cause us to suffer, it’s how we relate to the things that happen to us that causes us to suffer.” — Pema Chödrön
“There’s actually nothing about you that can come up that you can’t say to yourself, ‘It’s essentially no problem; it’s okay’ … Develop that all-embracing attitude towards your very being.” — Pema Chödrön
“The gift that I’ve experienced is that whatever is happening, if you don’t judge it, then there’s some kind of ease with whatever happens. But if you call it ‘good’ or ‘bad’, then you begin to get into this kind of war with yourself.” — Pema Chödrön
“If your view is basic badness, you see it wherever you go. If your view is basic goodness, you see it wherever you go.” — Pema Chödrön
“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.” — Pema Chödrön
“You are the sky. Everything else – it’s just the weather.” — Pema Chödrön
Pema Chödrön Quotes on Awakening & Awakeness
“You really get transformed in the process. First of all, you give up that strong identity of being that other person, you go through the very profound questioning of, ‘Who am I now?’, and that gets you closer to realizing you’re not fixed, your not a fixed identity.” — Pema Chödrön
“The whole point is to notice what’s happening with kindness, sense of humor, gentle touch, but also be almost ruthlessly honest moving toward the place of no self-deception or nothing to hide from yourself. If you can combine that moving in the direction of nothing to hide from yourself with humor and loving kindness then the whole thing begins to transform your being.” — Pema Chödrön
“Whatever arises is fresh—the essence of realization. Whatever arises in our body or in the confused mind, it’s regarded as the essence of realization. Whatever arises. If you cling to it as ‘I’m doing well now’ or ‘this is how it’s supposed to be’, that’s adding something extra. If you panic or criticize, that’s adding something extra. On the other hand, even the panic and the praise are whatever arises, is fresh, the essence of realization.” — Pema Chödrön
“My main faith is that sentient beings have the capacity to awaken … My main passion in life is to awaken myself. I believe that everybody could do that, and I will devote my life—to the degree that I can awaken—to trying to inspire other people to awaken.” — Pema Chödrön
“The few people I’ve met in my life that I consider to be completely awake, they learn to stay. That’s what you feel, you feel the sense of eternal present. They don’t go off anywhere like we do, they just stay. That seems to be what enlightenment is; it’s the simplest thing and the most profound thing at the same time.“ — 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
Pema Chödrön Quotes on Presence & Uncertainty
“The best spiritual instruction is when you wake up in the morning and say, ‘I wonder what’s going to happen today’ and then carry that kind of curiosity through your life.” — Pema Chödrön
“We’re always seeking ground—that’s the basis of what we call self-absorption or ego-clinging—always seeking something to hold on to. What the Buddha’s teachings say is the fundamental state is always changing, fluid and open. That the natural state is that it’s unfixated and open, and there really is nothing to hold on to. This is not bad news, and there is no reason to freak out about this, but we all seem to be programmed in denial. We don’t like the insecurity. Someone said insecurity is ego’s take on the wide-open, clear, unfettered, fresh space, and we find that extremely uncomfortable.” — Pema Chödrön
“A lot of us are just running around in circles pretending that there’s ground where there actually isn’t any ground. Somehow if we could learn to not be afraid of groundlessness, not be afraid of insecurity and uncertainty, it would be calling on an inner strength that would allow us to be open, and free, and loving, and compassionate in any situation.” — Pema Chödrön
“What we discipline is not our ‘badness’ or our ‘wrongness.’ What we discipline is any form of potential escape from reality. In other words, discipline allows us to be right here and connect with the richness of the moment.” — Pema Chödrön
“Fully present is a wide-awake state where your sense perceptions are wide open. It’s if you could imagine seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, and so forth without any filter between you and your experience.” — Pema Chödrön
“Letting there be room for not knowing is the most important thing of all.” — Pema Chödrön
Pema Chödrön Quotes on Breathing & Meditating
“Anyone who has meditated even one day learned fast that we are almost never present.” — Pema Chödrön
“What we find if we’re not used to sitting quietly with ourselves—not used to meditation, not used to having any inner solitude in our lives—is that we’re very threatened by nothing happening.” — Pema Chödrön
“People who meditate do become much more in tune with being able to notice that they’ve been hooked and then also notice what they’re saying to themselves … It does give you more clarity about what’s going on with you.” — Pema Chödrön
“Everyone needs some solitude in their life … You find time out in the busyness of the whole thing.” — Pema Chödrön
“Remain embodied. Keep touching in physically with how you’re feeling. It’s like self-reflection, but at the level of the physical body.” — Pema Chödrön
“When we pause, allow a gap and breathe deeply, we can experience instant refreshment. Suddenly, we slow down, look out, and there’s the world.” — Pema Chödrön
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