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A quote to change how you wake up, every morning:
“The Navajo teach their children that every morning when the sun comes up, it’s a brand-new sun. It’s born each morning, it lives for the duration of one day, and in the evening it passes on, never to return again. As soon as the children are old enough to understand, the adults take them out at dawn and they say, ‘The sun has only one day. You must live this day in a good way, so that the sun won’t have wasted precious time.’ Acknowledging the preciousness of each day is a good way to live, a good way to reconnect with our basic joy.” ~ Pema Chödrön
How to Make Friends with all of Your Sweet Self: Maitri.
Buddhism is all about waking up.
Maitri is the art of developing an unconditional friendliness toward every part of our sweet selves—the tired, the mending, the broken, the wonderful, the always-changing. It’s not about baths and epsom salts, though that sounds darned good right about now.
It’s about making friends with the parts of ourselves we despise or bully or hide away.
It’s not about getting “better”—the fundamentally good version of yourself is right here, right now.
In our Find your Voice course this Autumn, we’ll practice maitri, healing, making friends fully with ourselves—so that we may be of joyful benefit to this precious world of ours. Together. In community.
It is never too late to fall in love with your life—or to help someone you love fall in love with theirs. Right now, the last “Find your Voice” Elephant Academy course—ever: is just $1 more if you join with a buddy.
This September is your last chance: if you’ve been thinking you’d like to enroll some day, that time is…now.
“Maitri is magical.”
Learning about it made entertaining myself with self-hatred damn near impossible. ~ Jaimee Smith
Listen to Waylon read the quote aloud to nearly 3,000 good humans in our Elephant Community:
This clip was a continuing part of Elephant’s (free) Community Retreat during the COVID-19 Pandemic. With the focus on community and conversation about joy, it’s still relephant today.
Show up for yourself. Show up for each other. Start your journey today.
More of our favorite Pema wisdom:
Pema Chödrön: How to do Tonglen, a meditation practice for difficult times.
Pema Chödrön: a Buddhist teaching on Loneliness, Rejection & a Broken Heart.
A Pema Chödrön teaching for when Life Doesn’t make a Damn Bit of Sense.
A Pema Chödrön Teaching to bring us into the Raw, Sweet Nakedness of Now.
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