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.

Searching for happiness prevents us from ever finding it.

What if rather than being disheartened by the ambiguity, the uncertainty of life, we accepted it and relaxed into it?

If we Pause and breathe in and out, then we can have the experience of timeless presence, of the inexpressible wisdom and goodness of our own minds. We can look at the world with fresh eyes and hear things with fresh ears.

All situations teach you, and often it's the tough ones that teach you best.

If we learn to open our hearts, anyone, including the people who drive us crazy, can be our teacher.

Meditation practice isn’t about trying to throw ourselves away and become something better. It’s about befriending who we are already. The ground of practice is you or me or whoever we are right now, just as we are. That’s the ground, that’s what we study, that’s what we come to know with tremendous curiosity and interest.