One of the age-old truths about love is that while it offers unparalleled opportunities for union and the lifting of ego boundaries, it also washes us up on the shores of the loved one's otherness. Sooner or later, love makes us feel inescapably separate.

To be free, to come to terms with our lives, we have to have a direct experience of ourselves as we really are, warts and all.

Meditation is not a means of forgetting the ego; it is a method of using the ego to observe and tame its own manifestations.

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

Trauma never goes away completely, it changes perhaps, softens some with time, but never completely goes away.

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

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