Words of Wisdom from Pema Chodron
‘Awakeness is found in our pleasure and our pain, our confusion and our wisdom,
available in each moment of our weird, unfathomable, ordinary everyday lives.’
~ Pema Chodron from ‘When Things Fall Apart – Heart Advice for Difficult Times’
I have found the above quote to be extremely invigorating, for many reasons. Being brought up in a very strict Christian family in Western Canada, my belief system and socio/cultural conditioning was such that ‘my life wasn’t supposed to be very pleasurable and any pleasure I did experience was likely the result of my own sin, any pain was my own fault too, there should be no confusion if I read the Bible, I would never be wise because I was too young and I was a girl and yes, I was very ordinary’. Of course I am playing this up. Reading Pema Chodron and other works from Eastern religious traditions, for me, brings balance to the Christian teachings and North American ideals by acknowledging that life includes suffering (pleasure and pain); we hold wisdom as well as confusion; there is room for diversity and eccentricity and our wonderful, ordinary lives are fonder for spiritual practice and daily ‘awakeness’ and aliveness. There is something about the yin/yang of it all that feels expansive and enlivening.