The challenge is to stay in the middle rather than to buy into struggle and complaint. The challenge is to let it soften us rather than make us more rigid and afraid. Becoming intimate with the queasy feeling of being in the middle of nowhere only makes our hearts more tender. When we are brave enough to stay in the middle, compassion arises spontaneously.

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:

• 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
• Life preferences
• Abiding in openness
• The queasy feeling of being in the middle of nowhere
• Idiot Compassion
• The root of happiness
• Our Shared Humanity