The Buddha said that we are never separated from enlightenment. Even at the times we feel most stuck, we are never alienated from the awakened state. This is a revolutionary assertion. Even ordinary people like us with hangups and confusion have this mind of enlightenment called bodhicitta. The openness and warmth of bodhicitta is in fact our true nature and condition.

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:

• A flexible identity
• Threefold purity
• 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