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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.