Our path, our sense of spirituality demands great earnestness, dedication, sincerity & continuity.

Everyone loses touch with their aspiration, and we need the heart to return to what we really care about. All of this is based on developing greater lovingkindness and compassion.

Meditation clarifies our minds and opens our hearts, and brings us to unusual depth and stability of happiness, whatever life brings.

From the Buddhist point of view, it is true that emptiness is a characteristic of all of life - if we look carefully at any experience we will find transparency, insubstantiality, with no solid, unchanging core to our experience. But that does not mean that nothing matters.

We can't control what thoughts and emotions arise within us, nor can we control the universal truth that everything changes. But we can learn to step back and rest in the awareness of what's happening. That awareness can be our refuge.

Throughout our lives we long to love ourselves more deeply and to feel connected with others. Instead, we often contract, fear intimacy, and suffer a bewildering sense of separation. We crave love, and yet we are lonely. Our delusion of being separate from one another, of being apart from all that is around us, gives rise to all of this pain.

Find a gap between a trigger event and our usual conditioned response to it and by using that pause to collect ourselves and shift our response