To open deeply, as genuine spiritual life requires, we need tremendous courage and strength, a kind of warrior spirit.

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

When we feel anger toward someone, we can consider that they are a being just like us, who has faced much suffering in life.

Compassion arises naturally as the quivering of the heart in the face of pain, ours and another's. True compassion is not limited by the separateness of pity, nor by the fear of being overwhelmed. When we come to rest in the great heart of compassion, we discover a capacity to bear witness to, suffer with, and hold dear with our own vulnerable heart the sorrows and beauties of the world.

Ours is a society of denial that conditions us to protect ourselves from any direct difficulty and discomfort. We expend enormous energy denying our insecurity, fighting pain, death and loss and hiding from the basic truths of the natural world and of our own nature.

There are many ways up the mountain and each of us must choose a practice that feels true to our heart.

The willingness to empty ourselves and then seek our true nature is an expression of great and courageous love.