Be kinder to yourself. And then let your kindness flood the world.

The truth you believe and cling to makes you unavailable to hear anything new.

When you have made good friends with yourself, your situation will be more friendly too.

As long as we're caught up in always looking for certainty and happiness, rather than honoring the taste and smell and quality of exactly what is happening, as long as we're always running from discomfort, we're going to be caught in a cycle of unhappiness and discomfort, and we will feel weaker and weaker. This way of seeing helps us develop inner strength. And what's especially encouraging is the view that inner strength is available to us at just the moment when we think that we've hit the bottom, when things are at their worst.

If you're invested in security and certainty, you are on the wrong planet.

Difficult things provoke all your irritations and bring your habitual patterns to the surface. And that becomes the moment of truth. You have the choice to launch into your lousy habitual patterns, or to stay with the rawness and discomfort of the situation and let it transform you.

To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest.