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.

While the primary function of formal Buddhist meditation is to create the possibility of the experience of "being," my work as a therapist has shown me that the demands of intimate life can be just as useful as meditation in moving people toward this capacity. Just as in formal meditation, intimate relationships teach us that the more we relate to each other as objects, the greater our disappointment. The trick, as in meditation, is to use this disappointment to change the way we relate.

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

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.

Anger is sign that something needs to change.

We are what we think, having become what we thought.

In building a path through the self to the far shore of awareness, we have to carefully pick our way through our own wilderness. If we can put our minds into a place of surrender, we will have an easier time feeling the contours of the land. We do not have to break our way through as much as we have to find our way around the major obstacles. We do not have to cure every neurosis, we just have to learn how not to be caught by them.