It is exceedingly difficult to maintain a sense of absence without turning that absence into some kind of presence

As my Buddhist teachers have shown me, wisdom emerges in the space around words as much as from language itself.

Meditation did not relieve me of my anxiety so much as flesh it out. It took my anxious response to the world, about which I felt a lot of confusion and shame, and let me understand it more completely. Perhaps the best way to phrase it is to say that meditation showed me that the other side of anxiety is desire. They exist in relationship to each other, not independently.

The central premise of this book is that the Western psychological notion of what it means to have a self is flawed.

To free desire from the tendency to cling, we have to be willing to stumble over ourselves.

I have come to see that our problem is that we don't know what happiness is. We confuse it with a life uncluttered by feelings of anxiety, rage, doubt, and sadness. But happiness is something entirely different. It's the ability to receive the pleasant without grasping and the unpleasant without condemning.

If aspects of the person remain undigested-cut off, denied, projected, rejected, indulged, or otherwise unassimilated-they become the points around which the core forces of greed, hatred and delusion attach themselves.