Anything we experience, no matter how challenging, can become an open pathway to awakening.

We don't experience the world fully unless we are willing to give everything away.

Usually we regard loneliness as an enemy. Heartache is not something we choose to invite in. It's restless and pregnant and hot with the desire to escape and find something or someone to keep us company. When we can rest in the middle, we begin to have a nonthreatening relationship with loneliness, a relaxing and cooling loneliness that completely turns our usual fearful patterns upside down.

It is only when we begin to relax with ourselves that meditation becomes a transformative process. Only when we relate with ourselves without moralizing, without harshness, without deception, can we let go of harmful patterns. Without maitri (metta), renunciation of old habits becomes abusive. This is an important point.

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.

To put it concisely, we suffer when we resist the noble and irrefutable truth of impermanence and death.

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