We see how beautiful and wonderful and amazing things are, and we see how caught up we are. It isn’t that one is the bad part and one is the good part, but that it’s a kind of interesting, smelly, rich, fertile mess of stuff. When it’s all mixed up together, it’s us: humanness.

If seeing that other person's pain brings up your fear or anger or confusion (which often happens), just start doing tonglen for yourself and all the other people who are stuck in the very same way.

You see, there really is no separation between you and everyone else.

Life's work is to wake up, to let the things that enter your life wake you up rather than put you to sleep.

When you refrain from habitual thoughts and behavior, the uncomfortable feelings will still be there. They don’t magically disappear. Over the years, I’ve come to call resting with the discomfort “the detox period,” because when you don’t act on your habitual patterns, it’s like giving up an addiction. You’re left with the feelings you were trying to escape. The practice is to make a wholehearted relationship with that

When we are willing to stay even a moment with uncomfortable energy, we gradually learn not to fear it.

When we scratch the wound and give into our addictions we do not allow the wound to heal.