There isn't anything except your own life that can be used as ground for your spiritual practice. Spiritual practice is your life, twenty-four hours a day.

The biggest obstacle to taking a bigger perspective on life is that our emotions capture and blind us.

Compassion for others begins with kindness to ourselves.

A further sign of health is that we don't become undone by fear and trembling, but we take it as a message that it's time to stop struggling and look directly at what's threatening us.

Discomfort of any kind becomes the basis for practice. We breathe in knowing our pain is shared.

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.

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