“Higher values propel and elevate us toward happiness, fulfillment, and meaning. Lower values demote us toward anxiety, depression, and suffering.”

Find me someone who has gone to the darkest parts of their own character where they were so close to their own self-destruction and found a way to get up and out of it, and I will bow on my knees to you. You’re my teacher.

Because the only thing that stays with you from the moment you’re born until the moment you die is your breath. All your friends, your family, the country you live in, all of that can change. The one thing that stays with you is your breath.

The more we define ourselves in relation to the people around us, the more lost we are.

If you follow your bliss, he said, doors will open for you that wouldn’t have opened for anyone else

We say things to ourselves that we would never say to people we love

Too often we love people who don’t love us, but we fail to return the love of others who do.

What’s on your news feed is feeding your mind.

Everyone has a story, and sometimes our egos choose to ignore that. Don’t take everything personally—it is usually not about you.

So people who come to this place, stay here for a while, and then continue their journey. Sounds like a hotel to me.

Most of our communication is nonverbal.

It is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else’s life with perfection.

Every night when I’m falling asleep, I say to myself, I am relaxed, energized, and focused. I am calm, enthusiastic, and productive.

Monks understand that routine frees your mind, but the biggest threat to that freedom is monotony. People complain about their poor memories, but I’ve heard it said that we don’t have a retention problem, we have an attention problem.

Never trust a spiritual leader who cannot dance.

Actually, the greatest detachment is being close to everything and not letting it consume and own you. That’s real strength.

Sometimes we can trace our fears through the actions we take, and sometimes it’s the actions we’re reluctant to take

One of the few blessings of living in an age of anxiety is that we are forced to become aware of ourselves.

The more you fail to experience your life fully, the more you will fear death.

The more unlived your life, the greater your death anxiety.

A person can meet anxiety to the extent that his values are stronger than the threat.

What anxiety means is it’s as though the world is knocking at your door, and you need to create, you need to make something, you need to do something. I think anxiety, for people who have found their own heart and their own souls, for them it is a stimulus toward creativity, toward courage. It’s what makes us human beings.

Death anxiety is the mother of all religions, which, in one way or another, attempt to temper the anguish of our finitude.

I pass for a hypersensitive, reclusive neurotic, which I may well be, but I hope the year won’t come when my anxieties and fatigue will destroy my love of this life, of all the things that inspire me–a line of music, a face in a Vermeer portrait, a character in an opera, or a model born in Harlem.

Courage is the capacity to meet the anxiety which arises as one achieves freedom. It is the willingness to differentiate, to move from the protecting realms of parental dependence to new levels of freedom and integration.