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:
- Everyday uncertainty
- The anxiety of opening
- Being inspired by everyday good fortune
- The first mark of existence
- Forgive into freshness
- A flexible identity
- Threefold purity
- Our true nature and condition
- Awakening our unlimited potential
- Happiness
- Dissolving our self-importance
- Cultivating equanimity
- The essence of generosity
- Cultivating equanimity
- Doing all with one intention
- Stay!
- Whatever we encounter
- Dissolving our fear
- Nothing and no one is fixed