All situations teach you, and often it’s the tough ones that teach you best.
Buddhism itself is all about empowering yourself, not about getting what you want.
If there’s any possibility for enlightenment, it’s right now, not at some future time. Now is the time.
There’s a reason you can learn from everything: you have basic wisdom, basic intelligence, and basic goodness.
Welcome the present moment as if you had invited it. It is all we ever have, so we night as well work with it rather than struggling against it. We might as well make it our friend and teacher rather than our enemy.
Rejoicing in ordinary things is not sentimental or trite. It actually takes guts. Each time we drop our complaints and allow everyday good fortune to inspire us, we enter the warrior’s world.
The root of compassion, is compassion for oneself.
There’s nothing more important on our spiritual path than developing gentleness to oneself.
The Process of becoming unstuck requires tremendous bravery, because basically we are completely changing our way of perceiving reality...
True compassion does not come from wanting to help out those less fortunate than ourselves but from realizing our kinship with all beings.
Somehow, in the process of trying to deny that things are always changing, we lose our sense of the sacredness of life. We tend to forget that we are part of the natural scheme of things.
The wisdom, the strength, the confidence – the awakened heart and mind are always accessible – here, now, always.
There isn’t anything except your own life that can be used as ground for your spiritual practice. Spiritual practice is your life, twenty-four hours a day.
Every day is a new opportunity to work with what you have inside toward enlightenment.
Fear is a natural reaction of moving closer to the truth. If we commit ourselves to staying right where we are, then our experience becomes very vivid. Things become very clear when there is nowhere to escape.
You must learn to sit with the restless, painful energy and not let the momentum pull you under and cause you to do the same thing over and over that’s ruining your life and the lives of those around you.
The teacher will never give up on the student no matter how mixed up he or she might be.
Awareness is the key. Do we see the stories that we’re telling ourselves and question their validity?
If we’re willing to give up hope that insecurity and pain can be eliminated, then we can have the courage to relax with the groundlessness of our situation. This is the first step on the path.
Obstacles are our friends: they teach us where we’re stuck.