“Use what seems like poison as medicine. Use your personal suffering as the path to compassion for all beings.”

Feeling irritated, restless, afraid, and hopeless is a reminder to listen more carefully.

Feel the feelings and drop the story.

The best spiritual instruction is when you wake up in the morning and say, ‘I wonder what’s going to happen today.’ And then carry that kind of curiosity through your life.

Usually we think that brave people have no fear. The truth is that they are intimate with fear.

All situations teach you, and often it’s the tough ones that teach you best.

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.

Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know. Even if we run a hundred miles an hour to the other side of the continent, we find the very same problem awaiting us when we arrive.

Let difficulty transform you. And it will. In my experience, we just need help in learning how not to run away.

So war and peace start in the human heart. Whether that heart is open or whether that heart closes has global implications.

Anything we experience, no matter how challenging, can become an open pathway to awakening.

Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing.

Whatever happens in your life, joyful or painful, do not be swept away by reactivity. Be patient with yourself and don’t lose your sense of perspective.

All the wars, all the hatred, all the ignorance in the world come out of being so invested in our opinions.

We have a choice. We can spend our whole life suffering because we can’t relax with how things really are, or we can relax and embrace the open-endedness of the human situation, which is fresh, unfixated, unbiased.

The truth you believe and cling to makes you unavailable to hear anything new.

Since death is certain and the time of death is uncertain, what is the most important thing?

Life is short. Time is fleeting. Realize the Self. Purity of the heart is the gateway to God. Aspire. Renounce. Meditate. Be good; do good. Be kind; be compassionate. Inquire, know Thyself.

So if you have over-indulged during the holidays, for example, please don’t beat yourself up, but rather have compassion and forgiveness and perhaps, even try the Ho’oponono technique.

Compassion without detachment is attachment to the bodily platform.

We must be instruments of God’s compassion to those who are suffering.

Preacher is an instrument of compassion, not an instrument of wrath.

Compassion is a college education. It’s a doctorate.

Lord’s love manifests in this world as compasssion.

Real compassion means to understand what the needs for body, mind and soul are.