There are some things we can’t choose, but in being present we can choose how we want to relate to them.
When we open to love, we become love.
If our hearts are ready for anything, we are touched by the beauty and poetry and mystery that fill our world.
Longing, felt fully, carries us to belonging.
The intimacy that arises in listening and speaking truth is only possible if we can open to the vulnerability of our own hearts. Breathing in, contacting the life that is right here, is our first step. Once we have held ourselves with kindness, we can touch others in a vital and healing way.
Paying attention is the most basic and profound expression of love.
Our attitude in the face of life’s challenges determines our suffering or our freedom.
Fear of being a flawed person lay at the root of my trance, and I had sacrificed many moments over the years in trying to prove my worth. Like the tiger Mohini, I inhabited a self-made prison that stopped me from living fully.
Imperfection is not our personal problem – it is a natural part of existing.
Observing desire without acting on it enlarges our freedom to choose how we live.
Suffering is our call to attention, our call to investigate the truth of our beliefs.
The most powerful healing arises from the simple intention to love the life within you, unconditionally, with as much tenderness and presence as possible.
The muscles used to make a smile actually send a biochemical message to our nervous system that it is safe to relax the flight of freeze response.
We, like the Mother of the World, become the compassionate presence that can hold, with tenderness, the rising and passing waves of suffering.
When we put down ideas of what life should be like, we are free to wholeheartedly say yes to our life as it is.
If our hearts are ready for anything, we can open to our inevitable losses, and to the depths of our sorrow. We can grieve our lost loves, our lost youth, our lost health, our lost capacities. This is part of our humanness, part of the expression of our love for life.
The Buddha never intended to make desire itself the problem. When he said craving causes suffering, he was referring not to our natural inclination as living beings to have wants and needs, but to our habit of clinging to experience that must, by nature, pass away.
Presence is not some exotic state that we need to search for or manufacture. In the simplest terms, it is the felt sense of wakefulness, openness, and tenderness that arises when we are fully here and now with our experience.
By regarding ourselves with kindness, we begin to dissolve the identity of an isolated, deficient self. This creates the grounds for including others in an unconditionally loving heart.
Pain is not wrong. Reacting to pain as wrong initiates the trance of unworthiness. The moment we believe something is wrong, our world shrinks and we lose ourselves in the effort to combat the pain.