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.

The picture we present to ourselves of who we think we ought to be obscures who we really are.

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

Anger is sign that something needs to change.

Uncovering your real desires can be terrifying. It can also set you spectacularly free.

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.

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