Every addiction starts with pain and ends with pain.

If you are not taking responsibility for your state of consciousness, you are not taking responsibility for life.

We get lost in doing, thinking, remembering, anticipating - lost in a maze of complexity and a world of problems. Nature can show us the way home, the way out of the prison of our own minds.

Some form of suffering often brings about a readiness. One can say it cracks open the shell of the egoic mind with which many people identify as "me." Life cracks open that shell, and once that crack is there, then we are reached more easily by spiritual teaching.

The word Buddha comes from the Sanskrit word Budh, meaning, to be awake. So Buddha is not a name and ultimately not a person, but a state of consciousness.

Acceptance looks like a passive state, but in reality it brings something entirely new into this world. That peace, a subtle energy vibration, is consciousness.

Become friendly with the present moment, because if you do not become friendly with the present moment you cannot become friendly with life.