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

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

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.

It’s one of my theories that when people give you advice, they’re really just talking to themselves in the past.

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.

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