Nathan Zorndorf

“In the early seventies, a friend kept saying to me, 'Whatever you do, don't try to make those feelings go away.' His advice went on: 'anything you can learn about working with your sense of discouragement or your sense of fear or your sense of bewilderment - anything you can do to work with those things - do it., please, because it will be such an inspiration to other people.”
― Pema Chödrön, The Wisdom of No Escape: How to Love Yourself and Your World

“Finally, the fourth reminder is the futility of continuing to spin around on this treadmill that is traditionally called samsara. Someone once said that she felt as if she were on a record that just kept going round and round; she had got stuck in this groove, and every time she went around, the groove got deeper and deeper. I've also heard people say that sometimes, when they hear them selves speak, they feel as if they're a tape recorder playing the same tape over and over and over. They get sick of it, but somehow they just keep playing it anyway because there is a funny little identity there that gives them some kind of security, painful though it may be. That's samsara.”
― Pema Chödrön, The Wisdom of No Escape: How to Love Yourself and Your World

“Suzuki Roshi gave the instructions, 'sit still. Don't anticipate...”
― Pema Chödrön, The Wisdom of No Escape: How to Love Yourself and Your World

“My middle and way your middle way are not the same middle way. For instance, my style is to be casual and soft-edged and laid back. For me to do what usually would be called strict practice is still pretty relaxed, because I do it in a relaxed way. So strict practice is good for me. It helps me find middle my way. Very relaxed practice doesn't show me as much because it doesn't show me where I'm out of balance. But perhaps you are much more militant and precise and on the dot. Maybe you tend toward being tight. It might be easy for you to do tight practice, but that might be too harsh and too authoritarian, so you might need to find out what it means to practice in a relaxed, loose way. Everybody is different. Everybody's middle way is a different middle way. Everyone practices in order to find out for him or herself personally how to be balanced, how to be not too tight and not too loose. No one else can tell you. You just have to find out for yourself.”
― Pema Chödrön, The Wisdom of No Escape: How to Love Yourself and Your World