Strength of the Heart comes from knowing that the pain that we each must bear is part of the greater pain shared by all that lives. It is not just 'our' pain, but 'the' pain and realizing this awakens our universal compassion

How well we have learned to let go

We don't know all the reasons that propel us on a spiritual journey, but somehow our life compels us to go.

Virtue and integrity are necessary for genuine happiness. Guard your integrity with care.

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.

One day Mara, the Buddhist god of ignorance and evil, was traveling through the villages of India with his attendants. He saw a man doing walking meditation whose face was lit up in wonder. The man had just discovered something on the ground in front of him. Mara's attendants asked what that was and Mara replied, "A piece of truth." "Doesn't this bother you when someone finds a piece of the truth, O evil one?" his attendants asked. "No," Mara replied. "Right after this they usually make a belief out of it."

...Spiritual opening is not a withdrawal to some imagined realm or safe cave. It is not a pulling away, but a touching of all the experience of life with wisdom and with a heart of kindness, without any separation.