Resistance to unwanted circumstances has the power to keep those circumstances alive and well for a very long time.

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

Over time, as the thinking mind begins to settle [through the practice of meditation], we’ll start to see our patterns and habits far more clearly. Sometimes this can be a painful experience. I can’t overestimate the importance of accepting ourselves exactly as we are right now, not as we wish we were or think we ought to be. By cultivating nonjudgmental openness to ourselves and to whatever arises, to our surprise and delight we will find ourselves genuinely welcoming the never-pin-downable quality of life, experiencing it as a friend, a teacher, and a support, and no longer as an enemy.

Right down there in the thick of things, we discover the love that will not die.

What you do for yourself, any gesture of kindness, any gesture of gentleness, any gesture of honesty and clear seeing toward yourself, will affect how you experience your world. In fact, it will transform how you experience the world. What you do for yourself, you’re doing for others, and what you do for others, you’re doing for yourself.

What you do for yourself, you're doing for others, and what you do for others, you're doing for yourself.

It is a commitment to respect whatever life brings that we develop wholehearted determination to use discomfort as an opportunity for awakening, rather than trying to make it disappear.