Sweat your prayers, dance your pain, and move on.

Compassion is a chameleon: it can wear the face of fear, anger, sadness, joy or even dispassion, depending on what's needed at the time. The compassionate Buddha has a smile in one eye and a tear in the other, and our Buddha mission is to lead people to true freedom, not to hold their hand and tell them that everything is going to be all right. In teaching, compassion means doing whatever needs to be done to get to the next phase.

There is no true joy and compassion except through the difficult emotions - all we get without the experience of fear, anger, and sadness are cheap imitations of joy and compassion - pleasantness and sentimentality.

To shed the past, forget the future and fall into the moment feet first.

Dance has been my medium, my metaphor, my message and my meditation.

The fastest, cleanest, most joyful way to break out of your own box is by dancing. I'm not talking about doing the stand-and-sway. I'm talking about dancing so deep, so hard, so full of the beat that you are nothing but the dance and the beat and the sweat and the heat.

It's beautiful to dance alone, beautiful to dance with your children, beautiful to dance with your friends, beautiful to dance with your lover, or even collectively. But the ultimate dance is the one we do by ourselves, when we make ourselves known to God.