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

I have come to see that our problem is that we don't know what happiness is. We confuse it with a life uncluttered by feelings of anxiety, rage, doubt, and sadness. But happiness is something entirely different. It's the ability to receive the pleasant without grasping and the unpleasant without condemning.

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.

Buddhism teaches us that happiness does not come from any kind of acquisitiveness, be it material or psychological. Happiness comes from letting go. In Buddhism, the impenetrable, separate, and individuated self is more of the problem than the solution.

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

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

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