“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.”

What is truly a part of our spiritual path is that which brings us alive. If gardening brings us alive, that is part of our path, if it is music, if it is conversation we must follow what brings us alive.

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.

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.

Just because you’re awake doesn’t mean you should stop dreaming.

I am accustomed to sleep and in my dreams to imagine the same things that lunatics imagine when awake.

Sometimes living is easy and sometimes you lie awake at night and ask your tired heart please survive one more day.

The more you suffer, the more you awaken.

The madman is a dreamer awake.

As you awaken to your divine nature, you’ll begin to appreciate beauty in everything you see, touch and experience.

And some men are as ignorant of what they do when awake as they are forgetful of what they do when asleep.

And some men are as ignorant of what they do when awake as they are forgetful of what they do when asleep.