When we protect ourselves so we won't feel pain, that protection becomes like armor, like armor that imprisons the softness of of the heart.

Obstacles are our friends: they teach us where we're stuck.

When we practice generating compassion, we can expect to experience our fear of pain. Compassion practice is daring. It involves learning to relax and allow ourselves to move gently toward what scares us. The trick to doing this is to stay with emotional distress without tightening into aversion, to let fear soften us rather than harden into resistance.

Don’t worry about achieving. Don’t worry about perfection. Just be there each moment as best you can.

Rather than becoming more relaxed, you start pulling down the shades and locking the door. When you do go out, you find the experience more and more unsettling and disagreeable. You become touchier, more fearful, more irritable than ever. The more you try to get it your way, the less you feel at home.

Fear itself is the vanguard of wisdom

If you work with your mind, instead of trying to change everything on the outside, that's how your temper will cool down.