The willingness to face traumas - be they large, small, primitive or fresh - is the key to healing from them. They may never disappear in the way we think they should, but maybe they don’t need to. Trauma is an ineradicable aspect of life. We are human as a result of it, not in spite of it.

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

It’s one of my theories that when people give you advice, they’re really just talking to themselves in the past.

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

When we seek happiness through accumulation, either outside of ourselves-from other people, relationships, or material goods-or from our own self-development, we are missing the essential point. In either case we are trying to find completion. But according to Buddhism, such a strategy is doomed. Completion comes not from adding another piece to ourselves but from surrendering our ideas of perfection.

Desire is a teacher: When we immerse ourselves in it without guilt, shame, or clinging, it can show us something special about our own minds that allows us to embrace life fully.

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.