There are many ways that we grow, but there are two major ways: We shed what no longer works, or we're broken open. If we're unwilling to shed, then we will be broken open. Through shedding, we are worn down, just as nature is eroded to its beauty. I think that through suffering, human beings are eroded to our beauty.

At the heart of each spiritual tradition is the question of how to be in the world without losing what matters, and whether living an awakened life is of any use if we don't bring what matters to bear on the world.

To listen is to continually give up all expectation and to give our attention, completely and freshly, to what is before us, not really knowing what we will hear or what that will mean. In the practice of our days, to listen is to lean in, softly, with a willingness to be changed by what we hear.

It has always amazed and humbled me to how the risk to bloom can seem so insurmountable beforehand and so inevitably freeing once the threshold of suffering is crossed.

We can never be prepared for everything. No one person can anticipate all of life. In fact, overpreparation is yet another way to wall ourselves in from life.

I would want to affirm how rare and magnificent and messy it is to be alive, how there is really nothing between us and life, though so many things get in the way, and how our heart is the strongest muscle and resource we have.

The point of experience is not to escape life but to live it.