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.

Pema Chödron

from the book The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times

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Further quotes from the book The Places That Scare You:

• The queasy feeling of being in the middle of nowhere
• The anxiety of opening
• Everyday uncertainty
• Cultivating equanimity
• Happiness
• Life preferences
• The root of happiness
• Awakening our unlimited potential
• Dissolving our self-importance
• Dissolving our fear
• At least until you die
• The first mark of existence
• Being in the middle of nowhere
• A flexible identity
• Our Shared Humanity
• Idiot Compassion
• Cultivating equanimity
• Abiding in openness
• The essence of generosity