My earliest experiences in meditation were in a context of intensive retreats.

As we look around, it's very clear that in this world people do outrageous things to one another all of the time. It's not that these qualities or actions make us bad people, but they bring tremendous suffering if we don't know how to work with them.

Love as a power can go anywhere. It isn't sentimental. It doesn't have to be pretty, yet it doesn't deny pain.

The Buddha said that no true spiritual life is possible without a generous heart. . . . Generosity allies itself with an inner feeling of abundance - the feeling that we have enough to share.

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.

Faith is not a commodity we either have or don't have-it is an inner quality that unfolds as we learn to trust our own deepest experience.

Meditation is a microcosm, a model, a mirror. The skills we practice when we sit are transferable to the rest of our lives.