Letting go is not the same as aversion, struggling to get rid of something. We cannot genuinely let go of what we resist. What we resist and fear secretly follows us even as we push it away. To let go of fear or trauma, we need to acknowledge just how it is. We need to feel it fully and accept that it is so. It is as it is. Letting go begins with letting be.

True love is not for the faint-hearted.

It is true that the heart has its seasons, just as a flower opens to the sunlight and closes to the night. We need to be respectful of those rhythms. But we can't close down for long. It is our true nature to have an open heart.

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.

Spiritual life doesn't make you a good person; you ARE a good person, you are a holy being when you are born. What spiritual life does is remind us that this is who we really are.

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.

We each need to make our lion's roar - to persevere with unshakable courage when faced with all manner of doubts and sorrows and fears - to declare our right to awaken.