“Compassion for ourselves gives rise to the power to transform resentment into forgiveness, hatred into friendliness, and fear into respect for all beings.”

It is true that the heart has its seasons, just as a flower opens to the sunlight and closes to the night. We need to be respectful of those rhythms. But we can’t close down for long. It is our true nature to have an open heart.

Have respect for yourself, and patience and compassion. With these, you can handle anything.

May I be given the appropriate difficulties so that my heart can truly open with compassion. Imagine asking for that.

Live in joy, luminosity, and peace even among the troubles of the world. Remember who you are.

Love is based on our capacity to trust in a reality beyond fear, to trust a timeless truth bigger than all our difficulties.

The willingness to empty ourselves and then seek our true nature is an expression of great and courageous love.

May you know the beauty of your own true nature.

Part of spiritual and emotional maturity is recognizing that it’s not like you’re going to try to fix yourself and become a different person. You remain the same person, but you become awakened.

Much of spiritual life is self-acceptance, maybe all of it.

Everything has a beginning and an ending. Make peace with that and all will be well…In life we cannot avoid change, we cannot avoid loss. Freedom and happiness are found in the flexibility and ease with which we move through change.

The basic principle of spiritual life is that our problems become the very place to discover wisdom and love.

At the end of our life our questions are simple: Did I live fully? Did I love well?

To live life is to make a succession of errors. Understanding this can bring us great ease and forgiveness for ourselves and others.

Most of us have spent our lives caught up in plans, expectations, ambitions for the future; in regrets, guilt or shame about the past. To come into the present is to stop the war.

Wisdom says we are nothing. Love says we are everything. Between these two our life flows.

As we willingly enter each place of fear, each place of deficiency and insecurity in ourselves, we will discover that its walls are made of untruths, of old images of ourselves, of ancient fears, of false ideas of what is pure and what is not.

Like the love of a parent for an only child, the tenderness of the Compassionate One is all-pervasive.

Be mindful, be compassionate and nurture the circumstances that find you in this good time so it will last longer.

They who forgive most shall be most forgiven.

I like to choose compassion over judgment and curiosity over fear.

Take a little time out of your busy day to give encouragement to someone who’s lost their way.

Be kind and gentle to those who are not gentle to themselves.

We may be unlovely yet we are not unloved.

Give, but, if possible, spare the poor man the shame of begging.