When you begin to touch your heart or let your heart be touched, you begin to discover that it's bottomless, that it doesn't have any resolution, that this heart is huge, vast, and limitless. You begin to discover how much warmth and gentleness is there, as well as how much space.

Trying to run away is never the answer to being a fully human. Running away from the immediacy of our experience is like preferring death to life.

Welcome the present moment as if you had invited it. Why? Because it is all we ever have.

By becoming intimate with how we close down and how we open up, we awaken our unlimited potential.

It isn't what happens to us that causes us to suffer; it's what we say to ourselves about what happens.

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

Remember that this is not something we do just once or twice. Interrupting our destructive habits and awakening our heart is the work of a lifetime.