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

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.

Compassionate action involves working with ourselves as much as working with others.

Just pausing for two to three breaths is a perfect way to stay present. This is a good use of our life. Indeed, it is an excellent, joyful use of our life. Instead of getting better and better at avoiding, we can learn to accept the present moment as if we had invited it, and work with it instead of against it, making it our ally rather than our enemy.

In the end, that's what we all need more than anything else: to be there for each other, in every kind of situation.

It is possible to move through the drama of our lives without believing so earnestly in the character that we play. That we take ourselves so seriously, that we are so absurdly important in our own minds, is a problem for us. We feel justified in being annoyed with everything. We feel justified in denigrating ourselves or in feeling that we are more clever than other people. Self-importance hurts us, limiting us to the narrow world of our likes and dislikes. We end up bored to death with ourselves and our world. We end up never satisfied.

Discomfort of any kind becomes the basis for practice. We breathe in knowing our pain is shared.