In all practices and traditions of freedom, we find the heart's task to be quite simple. Life offers us just what it offers, and our task is to bow to it, to meet it with understanding and compassion.

Finding a way to extend forgiveness to ourselves is one of our most essential tasks. Just as others have been caught in suffering, so have we. If we look honestly at our life, we can see the sorrows and pain that have led to our own wrongdoing. In this we can finally extend forgiveness to ourselves; we can hold the pain we have caused in compassion. Without such mercy, we will live our own life in exile.

In the end, just three things matter: How well we have lived How well we have loved How well we have learned to let go

How did we get into this funny-looking body that has a hole at one end in which we regularly stuff dead plants and animals? It's bizarre that we got here, incarnated into this world with these bodies.

We need a repeated discipline, a genuine training, in order to let go of our old habits of mind and to find and sustain a new way of seeing.

Love is based on our capacity to trust in a reality beyond fear, to trust a timeless truth bigger than all our difficulties.

Everybody needs to take some time, in some way, to quiet themselves and really listen to their heart.