“Whatever happens in your life, joyful or painful, do not be swept away by reactivity. Be patient with yourself and don’t lose your sense of perspective.”

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.

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

Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing.

All the wars, all the hatred, all the ignorance in the world come out of being so invested in our opinions.

We have a choice. We can spend our whole life suffering because we can’t relax with how things really are, or we can relax and embrace the open-endedness of the human situation, which is fresh, unfixated, unbiased.

The truth you believe and cling to makes you unavailable to hear anything new.

Since death is certain and the time of death is uncertain, what is the most important thing?

The greatest obstacle to connecting with our joy is resentment.

If you follow your heart, you’re going to find that it is often extremely inconvenient.

It isn’t what happens to us that causes us to suffer; it’s what we say to ourselves about what happens.

As our kindness for ourselves grows, so does our kindness for other people.

If we learn to open our hearts, anyone, including the people who drive us crazy, can be our teacher.

Christian wife! Follow in the footsteps of the ideal of all womanhood, the Blessed Mother of God; in joy and in sorrow, she will be your advocate at the throne of her Son.

Right now is the time for you to visualize and create your future. Make it as healthy and bright and joyful as you can. It’s your life, and you’re going to live it.

Eventually, you have to stop picking a fight with your true nature and decide to seek the joy that underlies it all.

Happiness is like rising bubbles — delightful and inevitably fleeting. Joy is the oxygen — ever present.

There, in the chords and melodies, is everything I want to say. The words just jolly it along. It’s always been my way of expressing what for me is inexpressible by any other means.

Joy cannot be pursued. It comes from within. It is a state of being. It does not depend on circumstances, but triumphs over circumstances. It produces a gentleness of spirit and a magnetic personality.

The spiritual life is a life beyond moods. It is a life in which we choose joy and do not allow ourselves to become victims of passing feelings of happiness or depression.

I am mystic bones and a curious heart. Pain and joy and stardust skin. A sacred soul container. Time and space and matter and illusion. Expansion and contraction. A breathing universe.