Pema Chodron Quote on Suffering and What We Should Do To Alleviate It
“It’s not the things that happen to us that cause us to suffer, it’s what we say to ourselves about the things that are happening.”
Pema Chodron, via Essential Zen Habits (Page 106)
Beyond the Quote (59/365)
Think about your mind like a movie theater. What you say to yourself is what directs and creates the movie that plays in your mind. You can direct and play whatever type of movie you want—action, comedy, romance, horror, adventure, thriller, etc. What you don’t get to do, however, is choose how the events in your movie unfold. So, if you can’t control how the events unfold, how can you control how the movie plays out? It’s all in the director’s (your) creative interpretation and expression of how those events influence the main character to think, feel, speak, and act (also you). You get to take the expression, “Everything happens for a reason” and you get to determine why everything happened and for what reason and see to it that the movie plays out in a direction of your choosing.
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“In cultivating compassion we draw from the wholeness of our experience – our suffering, our empathy, as well as our cruelty and terror. It has to be this way. Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It’s a relationship between equals. Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others. Compassion becomes real when we recognize our shared humanity.” ~ Pema Chödrön