For me, language and how I use it are very important. I held back on doing a poetry book, walking the fine line between trying to be helpful and just putting more junk out there.

In looking for my mind, I discovered that it seems to be in many different places. Sometimes it is drinking a glass of water, remembering swimming in the summer, feeling the breeze. In this contemplation I observed that the self is more elusive than I thought.

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.

A book very much is the center of the road, so people always can refer back to it.

I would say courage first; then wisdom, which is a sense of knowledge and confidence; and also the wish and desire to uplift. The underlying notion is "How do I help?" That attitude really is a spiritual journey and a path.

We suffer because we want life to be different from what it is. We suffer because we try to make pleasurable what is painful, to make solid what is fluid, to make permanent what is always changing.

People can be trained in certain principles, but then they actually have to apply them and try them out.