It's not a terrible thing that we feel fear when faced with the unknown. It is part of being alive, something we all share.

Compassionate action involves working with ourselves as much as working with others.

What you do for yourself, any gesture of kindness, any gesture of gentleness, any gesture of honesty and clear seeing toward yourself, will affect how you experience your world. In fact, it will transform how you experience the world. What you do for yourself, you’re doing for others, and what you do for others, you’re doing for yourself.

Gloriousness and wretchedness need each other. One inspires us, the other softens us.

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

The most important aspect of being on a spiritual path may be to just keep moving.

Usually we regard loneliness as an enemy. Heartache is not something we choose to invite in. It's restless and pregnant and hot with the desire to escape and find something or someone to keep us company. When we can rest in the middle, we begin to have a nonthreatening relationship with loneliness, a relaxing and cooling loneliness that completely turns our usual fearful patterns upside down.