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.

I've spent quite a bit of my life as a meditation teacher and writer commending the strengths of love and compassion.

To offer our hearts in faith means recognizing that our hearts are worth something, that we ourselves, in our deepest and truest nature, are of value.

One of the primary conditions for suffering is denial. Shutting our mind to pain, whether in ourselves or others, only ensures that it will continue. We must have the strength to face it without turning away. By opening to the pain we see around us with wisdom and compassion, we start to experience the intimate connection of our relationship with all beings.

Meditation teaches us to focus and to pay clear attention to our experiences and responses as they arise, and to observe them without judging them.

What unites us as human beings is an urge for happiness which at heart is a yearning for union.

Loving ourselves opens us to truly knowing ourselves as part of the matrix of existence, inextricably connected to the boundlessness of life... when we see that we are far bigger than the person that is delineated by family or cultural expectations, we realize we are capable of so much more than we usually dare to imagine.