The difference between misery and happiness depends on what we do with our attention.
If I am feeling stupid, angry, jealous, or humiliated, I bring total awareness and acknowledgment to those feelings. I admit my failures and own them. Then I usually start laughing as I realize how small and inconsequential I really am and also how ridiculous my problems are!
You could search the whole world over and never find anyone as deserving of your love as yourself.
What arises in our experience is much less important than how we relate to what arises in our experience.
To celebrate someone else’s life, we need to find a way to look at it straight on, not from above with judgment or from below with envy.
We can always begin again. No matter what happens, no matter how long its been, no matter how far from our aspirations we may have strayed, we can always always begin again.
When we forgive someone, we don’t pretend that the harm didn’t happen or cause us pain. We see it clearly for what it was, but we also come to see that fixating on the memory of harm generates anger and sadness.
The skills available to us through mindfulness make it possible to bring love to our connections with others.
What we learn in meditation, we can apply to all other realms of our lives.
It is a great happiness to be able to give.
When we believe a wounding story, our whole world is diminished.
When our focus is on seeking, perfecting, or clinging to romance, the charge is often generated by instability, rather than by an authentic connection with another person.
Buddhist teachings discourage us from clinging and grasping to those we hold dear, and from trying to control the people or the relationship. What’s more, we’re encouraged to accept the impermanence of all things: the flower that blooms today will be gone tomorrow, the objects we possess will break or fade or lose their utility, our relationships will change, life will end.
Whether we fear the existence of boundaries with others or crave more of them, there’s no denying that individuation and separation are inevitable parts of loving relationships that become the site of tension.
Our senses are often the gateway to our stories.
When we pay attention to sensations in our bodies, we can feel that love is the energetic opposite of fear.
Taking responsibility for oneself is by definition an act of kindness.
When we can step back even briefly from our hurt, sorrow, and anger, when we put our faith in the possibility of change, we create the possibility for non-judgmental inquiry that aims for healing rather than victory.
All of our actions can signify self-love or self-sabotage.
By experimenting with sympathetic joy, we break from the constricted world of individual struggle and see that joy exists in more places than we have yet imagined.
Why be unhappy about something if you can do something about it? If you can’t do anything about it, why be unhappy about it?