Who I believed myself to be was a hopeless case. I would wake up in the mornings and notice I was still alive and breathing and hate God, hate myself, hate life, and contemplate ways of killing myself.

When you question what you believe, you leave the world, really, and what the world believes. It puts you in a very interesting position.

With inquiry, every painful story unravels. Freedom is possible in every moment.

I used to sleep on the floor next to the bed, because I believed that I didn't even deserve a bed to sleep in. And then, one morning, a cockroach crawled onto my leg. I looked at it, and suddenly I awoke from a kind of hypnotic trance in which I had been all my life.

Pay close attention to the particular thoughts you use to deprive yourself of happiness.

When we believe in our thoughts, when we tell ourselves a story, we suffer. 'My husband doesn't respect me.' 'I should be thinner.' Those are stories. When there's no story, there's no suffering.

The ego is terrified of the truth. And the truth is that the ego doesn't exist.