As we learn to have compassion for ourselves, the circle of compassion for others - what and whom we can work with, and how - becomes wider.

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

Anything we experience, no matter how challenging, can become an open pathway to awakening.

When we feel left out, inadequate, or lonely, can we take a warrior’s perspective and contact bodhichitta?

We see how beautiful and wonderful and amazing things are, and we see how caught up we are. It isn’t that one is the bad part and one is the good part, but that it’s a kind of interesting, smelly, rich, fertile mess of stuff. When it’s all mixed up together, it’s us: humanness.

Sometimes we find that we like our thoughts so much that we don't want to let them go.

We feel that we have to be right so that we can feel good. We don’t want to be wrong because then we’ll feel bad. But we could be more compassionate toward all these parts of ourselves. The whole right and wrong business closes us down and makes our world smaller. Wanting situations and relationships to be solid, permanent, and graspable obscures the pith of the matter, which is that things are fundamentally groundless.