It doesn’t matter if you’re rich or poor-the determining factor of success and happiness is contentment.

Certain teachers have tremendous amounts of experience. They are articulate, and they give wonderful discourse. But at some point along the road, they themselves learned from and studied a book.

In meditation we are continuously discovering who and what we are.

What is amazing is how stuck people are in their own habits. It is really hard to get people out of their habits. But once they shift, it also is amazing how rapid the progress can be.

We want to infuse our day with good habits so that we can turn seemingly mundane situations into a ceremony of goodness.

I think Shambhala can be a very strong force as a social example of how you can try to live a life balanced in terms of both the spiritual and the secular.

When I ask people to contemplate selflessness, the sometimes react as if I've asked them to put their house on the market or give away all their money. If there was a self that existed in the way we think, discovering selflessness would be like putting our house on the market. But in the Buddhist tradition, the discovery of selflessness is called "completely joyful." It's not called "the raw end of the deal," or "I'd rather go back to bed," or "This is scary and depressing."