“The central question of a warrior’s training is not how we avoid uncertainty and fear but how we relate to discomfort.”

By the way that we think and by the way that we believe in things, in that way our world is created.

Rejoicing in ordinary things is not sentimental or trite. It actually takes guts. Each time we drop our complaints and allow everyday good fortune to inspire us, we enter the warrior’s world.

Deep down in the human spirit, there is a reservoir of courage. It is always available, always waiting to be discovered.

In the end, that’s what we all need more than anything else: to be there for each other, in every kind of situation.

Appreciate everything, even the ordinary. Especially the ordinary.

Let your curiosity be greater than your fear.

You are the sky. Everything else – it’s just the weather.

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.

To undertake a genuine spiritual path is not to avoid difficulties but to learn the art of making mistakes wakefully, to bring them to the transformative power of our heart.

Chasing unavailable people is a sneak way for the ego to avoid intimacy.

Being busy is a form of laziness – lazy thinking and indiscriminate action. Being busy is most often used as a guise for avoiding the few critically important but uncomfortable actions.

There are accents in the eye which are not on the tongue, and more tales come from pale lips than can enter an ear. It is both the grandeur and the pain of the remoter moods that they avoid the pathway of sound.

Avoidance. Probably the worst dance. – Complicated.

You can never change what you don’t confront and transform what you avoid.

The activity you’re most avoiding contains your biggest opportunity.

The desire to break the silence with constant human noise is, I believe, precisely an avoidance of the sacred terror of that divine encounter.