When you rest in presence and pure awareness, sometimes everything is experienced as love because you're connected with all that is, and love is simply the nature of being.

With growing awareness, you can see where you're caught or where you suffer or where you create suffering. You can then turn toward the difficulties that arise in your life with compassion, bow, and say, these too are part of human incarnation.

When we struggle to change ourselves we, in fact, only continue the patterns of self-judgement and aggression. We keep the war against ourselves alive.

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.

To let go does not mean to get rid of. To let go means to let be. When we let be with compassion, things come and go on their own.

The first level of practice is illuminated by the qualities of courage and renunciation.

In this there is no judgment and no blame, for we seek not to perfect the world but to perfect our love for what is on this earth.