Though outer events may be difficult, the key to our happiness is how our mind responds to them.

Though outer events may be difficult, the key to our happiness is how our mind responds to them.

You awaken your True spirit by way of the broken heart: ragged, vulnerable, fierce and finally compassionate. Chris trod this rough way and shows honestly how it can be done.

Thich Nhat Hanh has the ability to express some of the most profound teachings of interdependence and emptiness I've ever heard. With the eloquence of a poet, he holds up a sheet of paper and teaches us that the rain cloud and the tree and the logger who cut the tree down are all there in the paper. He's been one of the most significant carriers of the lamp of the dharma to the West that we have had.

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.

To bow to the fact of our life's sorrows and betrayals is to accept them; and from this deep gesture we discover that all life is workable. As we learn to bow, we discover that the heart holds more freedom and compassion than we could imagine.

Where we tended to be judgmental, we became more judgmental of ourselves in our spiritual practice.