chodron

Pema Chodron talks about her early reluctance to join into an unconditional relationship with Trungpa Rinpoche

"Steadfastness with one particular person translates into steadfastness with any situation that you could possibly encounter."

"I consider myself a spiritual friend to my students. I’m not a guru."

"The teacher serves as a mirror but also encourages your ability to trust in yourself."


"What is it that encourages a person to hang in there so that the minute
the teacher does something that you don’t like you don’t say, “I’m
outta here”? We Westerners have a strong habitual tendency to idealize
our authority figures. We romanticize them.
 
For Western students what
needs to be communicated is that the mind of the teacher and student
meet, not by the student making the teacher all pure or all evil, but
in the ambiguity between those two, in the capacity to sustain
uncertainty.

Otherwise, in the name of true devotion you’ll get a kind
of worship that inevitably flips into vast disillusionment because
sooner or later the teacher does something that the student can’t
handle."

"What I was left with from Trungpa Rinpoche was this: that between the
teacher and the student there can be a meeting of minds, a mutual
communication. The job of the teacher is to help the student experience
that their mind and the mind of the teacher are the same."