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

We are looking for a way to feel more real, but we do not realize that to feel more real we have to push ourselves further into the unknown.

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

If aspects of the person remain undigested-cut off, denied, projected, rejected, indulged, or otherwise unassimilated-they become the points around which the core forces of greed, hatred and delusion attach themselves.

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

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.