Once you create a self-justifying storyline, your emotional entrapment within it quadruples.

To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-man's-land, to experience each moment as completely new and fresh. To live is to be willing to die over and over again.

We sow the seeds of our future hells or happiness by the way we open or close our minds right now.

If we run a hundred miles an hour to the other end of the continent in order to get away from the obstacle, we find the very same problem waiting for us when we arrive. It just keeps returning with new names, forms, manifestations until we learn whatever it has to teach us about where we are separating ourselves from reality, how we are pulling back instead of opening up, closing down instead of allowing ourselves to experience fully whatever we encounter, without hesitating or retreating into ourselves.

A further sign of health is that we don't become undone by fear and trembling, but we take it as a message that it's time to stop struggling and look directly at what's threatening us.

This genuine heart of sadness can teach us great compassion. It can humble us when we're arrogant and soften us when we are unkind.

Tonglen dissolves your solid sense of "I'm the wise person, I'm going to help this poor, unfortunate loser."