Knowing pain is a very important ingredient of being there for another person.

We don’t sit in meditation to become good meditators. We sit in meditation so that we’ll be more awake in our lives.

We see how beautiful and wonderful and amazing things are, and we see how caught up we are. It isn’t that one is the bad part and one is the good part, but that it’s a kind of interesting, smelly, rich, fertile mess of stuff. When it’s all mixed up together, it’s us: humanness.

The future is completely open and we are writing it moment to moment.

Meditation practice isn't about trying to throw ourselves away and become something better. It's about befriending who we are already.

Until we stop clinging to the concept of good and evil, the world will continue to manifest as friendly goddesses and harmful demons.

The very first noble truth of the Buddha points out that suffering is inevitable for human beings as long as we believe that things last—that they don’t disintegrate, that they can be counted on to satisfy our hunger for security.