It's a transformative experience to simply pause instead of immediately filling up space.

Blaming is a way to protect your heart, trying to protect what is soft and open and tender in yourself.

Loving kindness towards ourselves doesn't mean getting rid of anything. It means we can still be crazy after all these years. We can still be angry after all these years. We can still be timid or jealous or full of feelings of unworthiness. The point is not to try to throw ourselves away and become something better. It's about befriending who we are already.

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

We can gradually drop our ideals of who we think we ought to be, or who we think we want to be, or who we think other people think we want to be or ought to be.

Opening to the world begins to benefit ourselves and others simultaneously. The more we relate with others, the more quickly we discover where we're blocked.

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