If spacious stillness is missing, the relationship will be dominated by the mind and can easily be taken over by problems and conflict. If stillness is there, it can contain anything.

The remnants of pain left behind by every strong negative emotion that is not fully faced, accepted, and then let go of join together to form an energy field that lives in the very cells of your body.

You pick up the phone and you talk to somebody. There's a voice on the other end and you say what you have to say. This is how I perceive my life. I don't see myself as "Oh, I'm doing this great thing because I'm going to give this talk, now everybody's going to be transformed."

Often suffering is the trigger, or a spiritual teaching, or both. Call it readiness, or grace. This is the beginning of the awakening process.

There are two levels to your pain: the pain that you create now, and the pain from the past that still lives on in your mind and body. Ceasing to create pain in the present and dissolving past pain - this is what I want to talk about now.

This is why very often you find educated people in the media who look at spiritual books but they are so identified with their thought process, they don't get it. They write reviews or articles and they miss the whole point. They can't see the essence. It's not their fault; it's not them personally. It's the human condition and its mind-identified state. And intelligence in itself doesn't help. You can have two or three Ph.D.s; it doesn't get you any closer to spiritual realization. In fact, you might be more distant.

Failures lies concealed in every success in every failure.