You practice mindfulness, on the one hand, to be calm and peaceful. On the other hand, as you practice mindfulness and live a life of peace, you inspire hope for a future of peace.
I hold my face in my two hands. No, I am not crying. I hold my face in my two hands to keep the loneliness warm – two hands protecting, two hands nourishing, two hands preventing my soul from leaving me in anger.
When you have a stomach ache you don’t tell your stomach to go away.
The kingdom of God is available to you in the here and the now. But the question is whether you are available to the kingdom.
Hatred and fear blind us. We no longer see each other. We see only the faces of monsters, and that gives us the courage to destroy each other.
Due to attachment, anger, and foolishness, I have committed numberless mistakes in speech, deed and thought. I bow my head and repent. I vow from today to begin anew, to live day and night in mindfulness, and not to repeat my previous mistakes.
We will not just say, “I love him very much,” but instead, “I will do something so that he will suffer less.” The mind of compassion is truly present when it is effective in removing another person’s suffering.
The bad things, don’t do them. The good things, try to do them. Try to purify, subdue your own mind. That is the teaching of all buddhas.
I have lost my smile, but don’t worry. The dandelion has it.
We need enlightenment, not just individually but collectively, to save the planet.
The reason we might lose love is because we are always looking outside of us, thinking that the object or action of love is out there. That is why we allow the love, the harmony, the mature understanding, to slip away from ourselves.
The Buddha always reminds us that our afflictions, including our fear and our desiring, are born from our ignorance. That is why in order to dissipate fear, we have to remove wrong perception.
If you realize that the other person is a human being too, and you have exactly the same kind of spiritual path, and then the two can become good practitioners. This appears to be practical for both.
Fear is born from ignorance. We think that the other person is trying to take away something from us. But if we look deeply, we see that the desire of the other person is exactly our own desire – to have peace, to be able to have a chance to live.
If the people who hurt us have anger or desperation within them then they suffer. When you see that someone suffers, you might be motivated by a desire to help him not to suffer anymore.
Be angry, it’s okay. To be angry, that is very human. And to learn how to smile at your anger and make peace with your anger is very nice.
There is no real separation between self or no-self. Anything you do for yourself you do for the society at the same time. And anything you do for society you do for yourself also.
Loving ourselves means loving our community. When we are capable of loving ourselves, nourishing ourselves properly, not intoxicating ourselves, we are already protecting and nourishing society.
We ourselves need love; it’s not only society, the world outside, that needs love. But we can’t expect that love to come from outside of us. We should ask the question whether we are capable of loving ourselves as well as others.
The only answer to fear is more understanding. And there is no understanding if there is no effort to look more deeply to see what is there in our heart and in the heart of the other person.