The next step is to learn to communicate with the people that you feel are causing your pain and misery- not to learn how to prove them wrong and yourself right but how to communicate from the heart.

The idea of karma is that you continually get the teaching that you need to open your heart.

Meditation is not about getting out of ourselves or achieving something better. It is about getting in touch with what you already are.

So war and peace start in the human heart. Whether that heart is open or whether that heart closes has global implications.

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.

Until we stop clinging to the concept of good and evil, the world will continue to manifest as friendly goddesses and harmful demons.

The first noble truth of the Buddha is that when we feel suffering, it doesn’t mean that something is wrong. What a relief.