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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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      “When we’re in any kind of pain, we can use it to open our hearts to the reality that people are always suffering.  Pain is something everyone experiences.  We can use it to ground us in the fundamental truth of our being.  Pain gives us firsthand experience by which to be kind and generous to others.  It gives us direct access through our empathy to helping others.  We can use pain to activate compassion.  We’d like others not to experience pain, and we can extend ourselves to them.  We can contemplate the words, ‘May all beings be free of pain.’  Our direct experience of pain only makes our wish more potent.  It may even decrease our pain, because it increases our joy.  This becomes a wonderful meditation, to sit there and contemplate the relief of pain and suffering of everyone, of the whole world—not only because it changes our attitude toward our own pain, but also because it’s opening our mind of enlightenment.  This kind of prayer is always healing.” ~ Sakyong Mipham, Turning the Mind Into An Ally (Page 144)

        “From a Buddhist point of view, human beings aren’t intrinsically aggressive; we are inherently peaceful.  This is sometimes hard to believe.  When we’re angry or upset, our untrained mind becomes belligerent and we routinely strike out at others.  We imagine that reacting aggressively to the object of our emotion will resolve our pain.  Throughout history we have used this approach over and over again.  Striking out when we’re in pain is clearly one way we perpetuate misery.  With a trained mind, a stable mind, a mind with a larger motivation than its own comfort, we find another way to work with difficulties of daily life.  When we’re in a difficult situation, we maintain our seat.  Instead of perpetuating misery by acting out aggression, we learn to use the rough spots to spark the courage to proceed on our journey.  Eventually we may actually be able to turn the mind of anger into the energy of love and compassion.” ~ Sakyong Mipham, Turning the Mind Into An Ally (Page 26)

          “Suffering is the state of mind that regards itself as real.  We can spend our whole life trying to create a solid, lasting self.  We can spend our whole life looking outside ourselves for something to reflect this delusion of solidity, to be as real and lasting as we wish ourselves to be.  Search though we will, it’s impossible to find what doesn’t exist, and the perpetual search causes suffering.” ~ Sakyong Mipham, Turning the Mind Into An Ally (Page 14)

            “If we want to undo our own bewilderment and suffering and be of benefit to others and the planet, we’re going to have to be responsible for learning what our own mind is and how it works, no matter what beliefs we hold.  Once we see how our mind works, we see how our life works, too.  That changes us.” ~ Sakyong Mipham, Turning the Mind Into An Ally (Page 5)

              “You may find it hard to recognize that time is the cause of your suffering or your problems.  You believe that they are caused by specific situations in your life, and seen from a conventional viewpoint, this is true.  But until you have dealt with the basic problem-making dysfunction of the mind—its attachment to past and future and denial of the Now—problems are actually interchangeable.  If all your problems or perceived causes of suffering or unhappiness were miraculously removed for you today, but you had not become more present, more conscious, you would soon find yourself with a similar set of problems or causes of suffering, like a shadow that follows you wherever you go.  Ultimately, there is only one problem: the time-bound mind itself.”

              Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now (Page 61)

                “It is because we are born human that we are guaranteed a good dose of suffering.  And chances are, if you or someone you love is not suffering now, they will be within five years, unless you are freakishly lucky.  Rearing kids is hard, work is hard, aging, sickness and death are hard, and Jordan emphasized that doing all that totally on your own, without the benefit of a loving relationship, or wisdom, or the psychological insights of the greatest psychologists, only makes it harder.” ~ Norman Doidge, via 12 Rules for Life (Page xvii)

                  “We look at people who are sick and we pity them because we believe that their lives has to be inherently less joyous than everyone else’s.  What we don’t see, is that when people suffer, when people feel pain, it’s just connecting them to life.  It’s connecting them to everyone else.  Because the truth is, no matter what kind of life you’re living, no matter what kind of circumstance you’re in, you’re going to feel miserable sometimes; You’re going to have nights when you feel like the entire world is closing in on you, and it’s never going to be okay again, and you’re always going to be alone—and you’re going to have days when you feel so happy to be alive; where you feel joyous and you feel inspired… And you are always going to feel all of that.  No matter if all of your dreams come true, and you’re living in that New York loft apartment, doing whatever you’ve ever wanted to do, and are in love and married and what not—you’re still going to feel the complexity of life.  Because life doesn’t discriminate between circumstance.  Life is not going to stop unfolding itself to you just because you’re sick or because your life isn’t how you think it’s supposed to be.  There is still going to be beauty.” ~ Claire Wineland, Klick MUSE New York

                    “Innovation doesn’t happen because there’s some person who’s in some great circumstance and everything is going well and they get on a roll and they make something for the world.  Innovation happens—art happens—because of suffering.” ~ Claire Wineland, Klick MUSE New York

                      “I have lived a life of a lot of pain and I’m not pretending that I haven’t.  I’ve had to deal with death; I’ve had to deal with painful surgeries; I’ve had to deal with being alone and scared in the hospital.  But I have had a beautiful life—and one that I am so incredibly proud of.  And that is not in spite of having Cystic Fibrosis… That’s because of it.” ~ Claire Wineland (19), Zappos All Hands Meeting

                        “Whether we’re talking about mental or physical effort, the first step to embracing the suck is to step up and face your fear of suffering.  We all share this fear, which stems from a deep-rooted need for certainty and security.  Pain is your body’s way of telling you that security is threatened because something is out of whack.  However, when you consistently experience the personal growth that accrues from deliberately putting yourself out of balance, such as with hard workouts, you begin to embrace that temporary pain for the rewards it brings.  The fear recedes into oblivion as you embrace the suck.” ~ Mark Divine, The Way of the Seal

                          “Without suffering and doubts, the mind will come to rest on clichés and stay there, until the spirit dies as well.  You must continually start over and challenge yourself.” ~ Robert Greene, Mastery