“Everything that has a beginning has an ending. Make your peace with that and all will be well.”

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.

No amount of meditation, yoga, diet, and reflection will make all of our problems go away, but we can transform our difficulties into our practice until little by little they guide us on our way.

Since death will take us anyway, why live our life in fear? Why not die in our old ways and be free to live?

We each need to make our lion’s roar – to persevere with unshakable courage when faced with all manner of doubts and sorrows and fears – to declare our right to awaken.

Use whatever has come to awaken patience, understanding, and love.

The waves do keep coming, so learn to surf.

Ours is a society of denial that conditions us to protect ourselves from any direct difficulty and discomfort. We expend enormous energy denying our insecurity, fighting pain, death and loss and hiding from the basic truths of the natural world and of our own nature.

Let go of the battle. Breathe quietly and let it be. Let your body relax and your heart soften. Open to whatever you experience without fighting.

Train your mind the same way you’d train a puppy: Be patient, be consistent, and have some fun along the way.

Attention to the human body brings healing and regeneration. Through awareness of the body we remember who we really are.

All begins with you surrounding yourself with the right people—the good and authentic people—and unsurrounding yourself with the wrong people. And we both know there are plenty of wrong people in this world.

For that which is without a beginning, a final cause need not be sought.

There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.

And so began one of the most exciting periods of my life, the time of discovery.

We began to talk about one’s faith and the storm.

Political promises are much like marriage vows. They are made at the beginning of the relationship between candidate and voter, but are quickly forgotten.

If you do different, you will have different. If you begin to require more of yourself, that in and of itself is different.

When you finally let go peace begins to flow.