What others do may be the stimulus of our feelings, but never the cause.

By maintaining our attention on what's going on within others, we offer them a chance to fully explore and express their interior selves. We would stem this flow if we were to shift attention too quickly either to their request or to our own desire to express ourselves.

I try never to hear what another person thinks of me. I enjoy life a lot more when I spend as little time as possible hearing or thinking about what other people think about me. I go to the needs behind the thoughts. Then I'm in a different world.

Every message, regardless of form or content, is an expression of a need.

Punishment is the root of violence on our planet.

An important aspect of self-compassion is to be able to empathically hold both parts of ourselves-the self that regrets a past action and the self that took the action in the first place.

Every moment each human being is doing the best we know at that moment to meet our needs. We never do anything that is not in the service of a need, there is no conflict on our planet at the level of needs. We all have the same needs. The problem is in strategies for meeting the needs.