Depressed people think they know themselves, but maybe they only know depression.

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

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

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.

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.

Anger is sign that something needs to change.

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