Mother Earth is very talented. She has produced Buddhas, bodhisattvas, great beings.
Many of us have been running all our lives. Practice stopping.
Love is the capacity to take care, to protect, to nourish.
In Buddhism, we talk of meditation as an act of awakening, to be awake to the fact that the earth is in danger and living species are in danger.
If you are motivated by loving kindness and compassion, there are many ways to bring happiness to others right now, starting with kind speech.
We need enlightenment, not just individually but collectively, to save the planet. We need to awaken ourselves. We need to practice mindfulness if we want to have a future, if we want to save ourselves and the planet.
Each time you look at a tangerine, you can see deeply into it. You can see everything in the universe in one tangerine. When you peel it and smell it, it’s wonderful. You can take your time eating a tangerine and be very happy.
You would not cry if you knew that by looking deeply into the rain you would still see the cloud.
When you look deeply into your anger, you will see that the person you call your enemy is also suffering. As soon as you see that, the capacity of accepting and having compassion for them is there.
Mindfulness must be engaged. Once there is seeing, there must be acting. Otherwise, what’s the use of seeing?
The roots of war are in the way we live our daily lives – the way we develop our industries, build up our society, and consume goods.
When our beliefs are based on our own direct experience of reality and not on notions offered by others, no one can remove these beliefs from us.
Preventing war is much better than protesting against the war. Protesting the war is too late.
The present moment is the only moment available to us and it is the door to all other moments.
Breathing in, I know I am breathing in. Breathing out, I know I am breathing out.
Being rich is an obstacle to loving. When you are rich, you want to continue to be rich, and so you end up devoting all your time, all your energy, in your daily life to stay rich.
When you look at the sun during your walking meditation, the mindfulness of the body helps you to see that the sun is in you; without the sun there is no life at all and suddenly you get in touch with the sun in a different way.
If you can feel that Mother Earth is in you, and you are Mother Earth, then you are not any longer afraid to die because the earth is not dying. Like a wave appears and disappears and appears again.
If you’re a politician, you might want to learn the Buddhist way of negotiation. Restoring communication and bringing back reconciliation is clear and concrete in Buddhism.
Anyone can practice some nonviolence, even soldiers. Some army generals, for example, conduct their operations in ways that avoid killing innocent people; this is a kind of nonviolence.