We learn in our guts, not just in our brain, that a life of joy is not in seeking happiness, but in experiencing and simply being the circumstances of our life as they are; not in fulfilling personal wants, but in fulfilling the needs of life...
There is one thing in life that you can always rely on: life being as it is.
It’s of no use to look back and say, “I should have been different.” At any given moment, we are the way we are, and we see what we’re able to see. For that reason, guilt is always inappropriate.
How do we know if our practice is a real practice? Only by one thing: more and more, we just see the wonder. What is the wonder? I don’t know. We can’t know such things through thinking. But we always know it when it’s there.
Awareness is our true self; it’s what we are. So we don’t have to try to develop awareness; we simply need to notice how we block awareness with our thoughts, our fantasies, our opinions, and our judgments. We’re either in awareness, which is our natural state, or we’re doing something else.
Joy is being willing for things to be as they are.
Life is a second-by-second miracle.
All I can be is who I am right now; I can experience that and work with it. That’s all I can do. The rest is the dream of the ego.
Trust in things being as they are is the secret of life. But we don’t want to hear that. I can absolutely trust that in the next year my life is going to be changed, different, yet always just the way it is.
We have self-centered minds which get us into plenty of trouble. If we do not come to understand the error in the way we think, our self-awareness, which is our greatest blessing, is also our downfall.
We are just living this moment; we don’t have to live 150,000 moments at once. We are only living one. That’s why I say you might as well practice with each moment.
None of us would choose to be Sisyphus; yet in a sense, we all are.
We are always doing something to cover up our basic existential anxiety. Some people live that way until the day they die.
Body tension will always be present if our good feeing is just ordinary, self-centered happiness. Joy has no tension in it, because joy accepts whatever is as it is.
In spiritual maturity, the opposite of injustice is not justice but compassion.
You cannot avoid paradise. You can only avoid seeking it.
Meditation is not about doing something.
To enjoy the world without judgment is what a realized life is like.
We tend to run our whole life trying to avoid all that hurts or displeases us, noticing the objects, people, or situations that we think will give us pain or pleasure, avoiding one and pursuing the other.
To some degree we all find life difficult, perplexing, and oppressive. Even when it goes well, as it may for a time, we worry that it probably won’t keep on that way.