Just as nurturing our ability to love is a way of awakening bodhichitta, so also is nurturing our ability to feel compassion. Compassion, however, is more emotionally challenging than loving-kindness because it involves the willingness to feel pain. It definitely requires the training of a warrior.
When we practice generating compassion, we can expect to experience our fear of pain. Compassion practice is daring. It involves learning to relax and allow ourselves to move gently toward what scares us. The trick to doing this is to stay with emotional distress without tightening into aversion, to let fear soften us rather than harden into resistance.
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Pema Chödron
from the book The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times
Read a random quote or see all quotes by Pema Chödron.
Further quotes from the book The Places That Scare You:
- Our Shared Humanity
- Idiot Compassion
- Cultivating equanimity
- Abiding in openness
- The essence of generosity
- Doing all with one intention
- Threefold purity
- Stay!
- Forgive into freshness
- Our true nature and condition
- Nothing and no one is fixed
- Whatever we encounter
- Being inspired by everyday good fortune
- The queasy feeling of being in the middle of nowhere
- The anxiety of opening
- Everyday uncertainty
- Cultivating equanimity
- Happiness
- Life preferences