Our top priority is to relieve suffering of human beings.
Instead of thinking of this and that, one thing after the other, let your mind recognize itself in a single moment. When the mind recognizes itself, there is no thing to see there. It’s just wide open. That’s because the essence of mind is empty. It’s wide open and free.
Let yourself become that space that welcomes any experience without judgement.
Life begins with love, is maintained with love, and ends with love. Right now, while we’re alive, is the time to practice and express love. So please take care of your love. Love is capable of reaching so many people.
Practicing discipline involves continually working to find space in our patterns, to find the gaps in the images we hold about ourselves. It also means finding the gaps in our ideas about others, releasing images that we hold about a manager, a coworker, a friend, or a partner.
A mantra is basically a means of talking with your thoughts and feelings. It’s a time-honored method sometimes referred to as prayer, but really it’s an opening of a conversation between the heart and the mind.
You don’t have to say anything. You don’t have to teach anything. You just have to be who you are: a bright flame shining in the darkness of despair, a shining example of a person able to cross bridges by opening your heart and mind.
The point is to be free, not to be crazy.
We believe deep down that we’ve lost something precious and are seeking it outside ourselves, never realizing that we are carrying it within us wherever we go.
Whether a Buddha comes into the world or not, the nature of things is still the nature of things. The Buddha is someone who realizes what is true, what actually exists. If we want to become enlightened, we simply have to acknowledge or recognize what is.
Simply let experience take place very freely, so that your open heart is suffused with the tenderness of true compassion.
Instead of focusing on some thoughts and feelings and pushing away others, just look at them as feathers flying in the wind. The wind is your awareness, your inborn openness and clarity.
Through recognizing and realizing the empty essence, instead of being selfish and self-centered, one feels very open and free.
If we can allow some space within our awareness and rest there, we can respect our troubling thoughts and emotions, allow them to come, and let them go. Our lives may be complicated on the outside, but we remain simple, easy, and open on the inside.
When you have achieved a state of calmness and readiness, then you are ready to know, ready to understand in a deep way the dance between emptiness and appearance. Once you catch a glimpse of that dance, don’t hang on to it. Just let it go, like your first glimpse of essence love.
True freedom comes about through confidence in liberating any and all thought states.
Your emotional understanding about the preciousness of your human birth comes through conscious, repetitive mind training.
We fail to see that recognizing, admitting, and clearly understanding the patterns we experience in our own lives can have a transformative effect on the way we function in the world and the way we relate to others.
A human being is a part of a whole called by us the universe.
The true bodhisattva spirit grows out of this personal sense of freedom. You discover that you don’t feel so needy anymore. You don’t crave another refueling – with shamatha or with other people’s love and attention – because you know within yourself how to be free, how to be confident. With this sense of security and freedom, you begin to direct your attention to the needs of others. The compassion expands.