You create a good future by creating a good present. How do you do that? By recognizing the goodness that is already inherent in the present moment, even in the midst of challenges. Discontent, blaming, complaining, self-pity cannot serve as a foundation for a good future, no matter how much effort you make.

True freedom is living as if you had completely chosen whatever you feel or experience in this moment. This inner alignment with the Now is the end of suffering.

How’ is always more important that ‘what.’ See if you can give much more attention to the doing than to the result that you want to achieve through it.

The mind, conditioned as it is by the past, always seeks to re-create what it knows and is familiar with. Even if it is painful, at least it is familiar. The mind always adheres to the known. The unknown is dangerous because it has no control over it. That's why the mind dislikes and ignores the present moment.

Even if they don't know it consciously, people can feel when you are making them into a means to an end only. And people are much less likely to do what you want them to do - for example, to buy the car - when they feel you are reducing them into a means to an end.

Just as without silence there could be no sound, you would not exist without the vital formless dimension that is the essence of who you are.

Instead of asking, “what do I want from life?,” a more powerful question is, “what does life want from me?