Having compassion starts and ends with having compassion for all those unwanted parts of ourselves. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.

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

But all the time our warmth and brilliance are right here. This is who we really are. We are one blink of an eye away from being fully awake.

The only way to ease our pain is to experience it fully. Learn to stay with uneasiness, learn to stay with the tightening, so that the habitual chain reaction doesn't continue to rule your life.

The central question of a warrior's training is not how we avoid uncertainty and fear but how we relate to discomfort.

Feelings like disappointment, embarrassment, irritation, resentment, anger, jealousy, and fear, instead of being bad news, are actually very clear moments that teach us where it is that we’re holding back. They teach us to perk up and lean in when we feel we’d rather collapse and back away. They’re like messengers that show us, with terrifying clarity, exactly where we’re stuck. This very moment is the perfect teacher, and, lucky for us, it’s with us wherever we are.

We hold on to hope, and hope robs us of the present moment.