Use what seems like poison as medicine. Use your personal suffering as the path to compassion for all beings.

That could be applied to whatever you feel. Maybe anger is your thing. You just go out of control and you see red, and the next thing you know you're yelling or throwing something or hitting someone. At that time, begin to accept the fact that that's "enraged buddha." If you feel jealous, that's "jealous buddha." If you have indigestion, that's "buddha with heartburn." If you're happy, "happy buddha"; if bored, "bored buddha." In other words, anything that you can experience or think is worthy of compassion; anything you could think or feel is worthy of appreciation.

In practicing meditation, we're not trying to live up to some kind of ideal -- quite the opposite. We're just being with our experience, whatever it is.

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

While we are sitting in meditation, we are simply exploring humanity and all of creation in the form of ourselves.

Everything that human beings feel, we feel. We can become extremely wise and sensitive to all of humanity and the whole universe simply by knowing ourselves, just as we are.

Our neurosis and our wisdom are made out of the same material. If you throw out your neurosis, you also throw out your wisdom.