When we practice generating compassion, we can expect to experience our fear of pain. Compassion practice is daring. It involves learning to relax and allow ourselves to move gently toward what scares us. The trick to doing this is to stay with emotional distress without tightening into aversion, to let fear soften us rather than harden into resistance.

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

Patience takes courage. It is not an ideal state of calm. In fact, when we practice patience we will see our agitation far more clearly.

Sticking with that uncertainty, getting the knack of relaxing in the midst of chaos, learning not to panic-this is the spiritual path.

We spend all our energy and waste our lives trying to re-create these zones of safety, which are always falling apart. That's the essence of samsara - the cycle of suffering that comes from continuing to seek happiness in all the wrong places.

If you work with your mind, that will alleviate all the suffering that seems to come from the outside.

We can begin to open our hearts to others when we have no hope of getting anything back. We just do it for its own sake.