The awakened heart and mind can be experienced as clarity itself, pure knowing.

To live fully is to let go and die with each passing moment, and to be reborn in each new one.

May I be given the appropriate difficulties so that my heart can truly open with compassion. Imagine asking for that.

The words of the Buddha offer this truth: ∼ Hatred never ceases by hatred but by love alone is healed.

Meditation takes discipline, just like learning how to play piano. If you want to learn how to play the piano, it takes more than a few minutes a day, once a while, here and there. If you really want to learn any important skill, whether it is playing piano or meditation, it grows with perseverance, patience, and systematic training.

In spiritual life there is no room for compromise. Awakening is not negotiable; we cannot bargain to hold on to things that please us while relinquishing things that do not matter to us. A lukewarm yearning for awakening is not enough to sustain us through the difficulties involved in letting go. It is important to understand that anything that can be lost was never truly ours, anything that we deeply cling to only imprisons us.

The independence and rebelliousness of our adolescence offer us yet another quality essential to our practice; the insistence that we find out the truth for ourselves, accepting no one's word above our own experience.