“With a clear intention and a willing spirit, sooner or later we experience the joy and freedom that arises when we recognize our common humanity with others and see that real love excludes no one.”

Meditation can be a refuge, but it is not a practice in which real life is ever excluded. The strength of mindfulness is that it enables us to hold difficult thoughts and feelings in a different way—with awareness, balance, and love

When we bring deep awareness to whatever’s bothering us, the same things might be happening, but we are able to relate to them differently.

By practicing meditation we establish love, compassion, sympathetic joy & equanimity as our home.

Just as a prism refracts light differently when you change its angle, each experience of love illuminates love in new ways, drawing from an infinite palette of patterns and hues.

By engaging in a delusive quest for happiness, we bring only suffering upon ourselves. In our frantic search for something to quench our thirst, we overlook the water all around us and drive ourselves into exile from our own lives.

Letting go is an inside job, something only we can do for ourselves.

Restore your attention or bring it to a new level by dramatically slowing down whatever you’re doing.

Meditation is the ultimate mobile device; you can use it anywhere, anytime, unobtrusively.

Once we are honest about our feelings, we can invite ourselves to consider alternative modes of viewing our pain and can see that releasing our grip on anger and resentment can actually be an act of self-compassion.

We have the power to improve our work lives immeasurably through awareness, compassion, patience & ingenuity.

Fearful of wasting a second, we hoard time as if it were money.

Like water poured from one vessel to another, metta flows freely, taking the shape of each situation without changing its essence.

We cannot simply forgive and forget, nor should we.

Mindfulness helps us get better at seeing the difference between what’s happening and the stories we tell ourselves about what’s happening, stories that get in the way of direct experience. Often such stories treat a fleeting state of mind as if it were our entire and permanent self.

Pain & suffering requires time, awareness, and an intentional practice of self-love to disentangle.

Because the development of inner calm & energy happens completely within & isn’t dependent on another person or a particular situation, we begin to feel a resourcefulness and independence that is quite beautiful—and a huge relief.

Different experiences they shape and form our perspective.

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

I definitely feel more complete than before. There’s a void you have when you don’t feel you’ve found the other part of who you are, so I’m in a different place now and that’s nice to experience.

Intuition is like reading a word without having to spell it out. A child can’t do that because it has had so little experience. A grown-up person knows the word because they’ve seen it often before.

Measurement of life should be proportioned rather to the intensity of the experience than to its actual length.

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

Experience is making mistakes and learning from them.

I felt that I had to write. Even if I had never been published, I knew that I would go on writing, enjoying it and experiencing the challenge.