It's not a terrible thing that we feel fear when faced with the unknown. It is a part of being alive, something we all share. We react against the possibility of loneliness, of death, of not having anything to hold on to. Fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to the truth.

The more we witness our emotional reactions and understand how they work, the easier it is to refrain.

True compassion does not come from wanting to help out those less fortunate than ourselves but from realizing our kinship with all beings.

Relaxing with something as familiar as loneliness is good discipline for realizing the profundity of the unresolved moments of our lives. We are cheating ourselves when we run away from the ambiguity of loneliness.....Rather than persecuting yourself or feeling that something terribly wrong is happening, right there in the moment of sadness and longing, could you relax and touch the limitless space of the human heart?

The second noble truth says that this resistance is the...mechanism of what we call ego, that resisting life causes suffering.

To put it concisely, we suffer when we resist the noble and irrefutable truth of impermanence and death.

As Buddhism moved to the West, one of the big characteristics was the strong place of women. That didn't exist in the countries of origin. It's just a sign of our culture.