It’s not easy to find your own way when you believe that you need love, approval, appreciation, or anything from your family. It’s particularly hard when you want them to see things your way.
Suffering over things that have happened to us is nothing more than an argument with the past.
I love what I think, and I’m never tempted to believe it.
An unquestioned mind is the world of suffering.
When you srgue with reality, you lose, but only 100% of the time.
One morning, in February 1986, out of nowhere, I experienced a realization. In an instant, I discovered that when I believed my stressful thoughts, I suffered, but when I questioned them, I didn’t suffer.
I have had the privilege of losing everything.
When we question our thoughts, we see that the craziness was never in the world, but in us.
There is no story that is you or that leads to you. Every story leads away from you.
The nightmare always becomes laughter, once it’s understood.
God, as I use the word, is another name for what is. I always know God’s intention: It’s exactly what is in every moment.
You can’t drop concepts. You can only shine a little flashlight on them as you do inquiry, an you see that what you thought was true wasn’t. And when the truth is seen, there’s nothing you can do to make the lie true for you again.
If you’re yelling within you that they shouldn’t yell at you, that is where the pain begins, not with their yelling at you.
I used to sleep on the floor next to the bed, because I believed that I didn’t even deserve a bed to sleep in. And then, one morning, a cockroach crawled onto my leg. I looked at it, and suddenly I awoke from a kind of hypnotic trance in which I had been all my life.
Your parents are your projection-nothing more.
I suffered from severe depression for over a decade. My condition deteriorated steadily. I was suicidal.
No one can give you freedom but you.
Love is worth living. Why do you trade life for less?
I can’t love you as you have been or will be. I can only love you as you are.
I’ve heard people say that they cling to their painful thoughts because they’re afraid that without them they wouldn’t be activists for peace. “If I feel peaceful,” they say, “why would I bother taking action at all?”