Peace requires us to surrender our illusions of control. We can love and care for others but we cannot possess our children, lovers, family, or friends. We can assist them, pray for them, and wish them well, yet in the end their happiness and suffering depend on their thoughts and actions, not on our wishes.

Breathing meditation can quiet the mind, open the body, and develop a great power of concentration.

If your compassion does not include yourself, it is incomplete.

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

Of course, you play the game of life because you got to be incarnated.

Even time is a concept. In reality we are always in the eternal present. The past is just a memory, the future just an image or thought. All our stories about past and future are only ideas, arising in the moment. Our modern culture is so tyrannized by goals, plans, and improvement schemes that we constantly live for the future. But as Aldous Huxley reminded us in his writings, "An idolatrous religion is one in which time is substituted for eternity...the idea of endless progress is the devil's work, even today demanding human sacrifice on an enormous scale.

Whatever we cultivate in times of ease, we gather as strength for times of change.