The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Timesby Pema ChodronWe always have a choice, Pema Chodron teaches: We can let the circumstances of our lives harden us and make us increasingly resentful and afraid, or we can let them soften us and make us kinder. Pema's previous works provided the inspiration and guidance to confront the problems and difficulties that life throws our way. Here she provides the specific tools to deal with them - to cultivate the awakened, compassionate ability to open our hearts and minds to our own suffering and that of others. This wisdom is always available to us, Pema teaches, but we usually block it with habitual patterns rooted in fear. Beyond that fear lies a state of openheartedness and tenderness. In The Places That Scare You, Pema Chodron shows us how to:
- Move toward what makes us feel insecure, uncertain, and fearful as a way to awaken our basic goodness and connect with others.
- Cultivate loving-kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity.
- Accept ourselves and others, complete with faults and imperfections.
- Stay in the present moment by seeing through the strategies of ego that cause us to resist life as it is.
- Use "on-the-spot" practices to tap into natural reservoirs of humor, flexibility, courage, and wisdom.
- Establish a relationship with a spiritual teacher
About the AuthorPema Chodron is an American Buddhist nun and one of the foremost students of Chogyam Trungpa, the renowned Tibetan meditation master. She is the author of The Wisdom of No Escape, Start Where You Are, and the bestselling When Things Fall Apart. She is the resident teacher at Gampo Abbey, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, the first Tibetan monastery in North America established for Westerners