I dedicate the merit of the occasion to all beings. This gesture of universal friendship has been likened to a drop of fresh spring water. If we put it on a rock in the sunshine, it will soon evaporate. If we put it in the ocean, however, it will never be lost. Thus the wish is made that we not keep the teachings to ourselves but to use them to benefit others.

Underneath our ordinary lives, underneath all the talking we do, all the moving we do, all the thoughts in our minds, there's a fundamental groundlessness. It's there bubbling along all the time. We experience it as restlessness and edginess. We experience it as fear. It motivates passion, aggression, ignorance, jealousy, and pride, but we never get down to the essence of it.

Being satisfied with what we already have is a magical golden key to being alive in a full, unrestricted, and inspired way.

Use what seems like poison as medicine. Use your personal suffering as the path to compassion for all beings.

In practicing meditation, we're not trying to live up to some kind of ideal -- quite the opposite. We're just being with our experience, whatever it is.

The third noble truth says that the cessation of suffering is letting go of holding on to ourselves.

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