Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It’s a relationship between equals. Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others. Compassion becomes real when we recognize our shared humanity.
To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-man’s-land, to experience each moment as completely new and fresh. To live is to be willing to die over and over again.
We have two alternatives: either we question our beliefs – or we don’t. Either we accept our fixed versions of reality- or we begin to challenge them. In Buddha’s opinion, to train in staying open and curious – to train in dissolving our assumptions and beliefs – is the best use of our human lives.
When you begin to touch your heart or let your heart be touched, you begin to discover that it’s bottomless, that it doesn’t have any resolution, that this heart is huge, vast, and limitless. You begin to discover how much warmth and gentleness is there, as well as how much space.
Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know.
All you need to know is that the future is wide open and you are about to create it by what you do.
When you begin to touch your heart or let your heart be touched, you begin to discover that it’s bottomless.
If we learn to open our hearts, anyone, including the people who drive us crazy, can be our teacher.
I can’t overestimate the importance of accepting ourselves exactly as we are right now, not as we wish we were or think we ought to be.
So war and peace start in the human heart. Whether that heart is open or whether that heart closes has global implications.
Being satisfied with what we already have is a magical golden key to being alive in a full, unrestricted, and inspired way.
One of the deepest habitual patterns that we have is to feel that now is not enough.
We spend all our energy and waste our lives trying to re-create these zones of safety, which are always falling apart. That’s the essence of samsara – the cycle of suffering that comes from continuing to seek happiness in all the wrong places.