We all have to practice, and we have to practice with all of our might for the rest of our lives.
But opinions, judgments, memories, dreaming about the future – ninety percent of the thoughts spinning around in our heads have no essential reality.
Meditation practice is simply moving from a life of hurting myself and others to a life of not hurting myself and others.
With unfailing kindness, your life always presents what you need to learn. Whether you stay home or work in an office or whatever, the next teacher is going to pop right up.
If I were to tell you that your life is already perfect, whole, and complete just as it is, you would think I was crazy. Nobody believes his or her life is perfect. And yet there is something within each of us that basically knows we are boundless, limitless.
We have to face the pain we have been running from. In fact, we need to learn to rest in it and let its searing power transform us.
Enlightenment is not something you achieve. It is the absence of something. All your life you have been going forward after something, pursuing some goal. Enlightenment is dropping all that.
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.