What comes up is not nearly as important as how you relate to what comes up.

What you learn about pain in formal meditation can help you relate to it in your daily life.

While you are meditating, if your mind wanders, gently bring it back to the present moment.

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

By prizing heartfulness above faultlessness, we may reap more from our effort because we're more likely to be changed by it.

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.

Compassion allows us to use our own pain and the pain of others as a vehicle for connection. This is a delicate and profound path. We may be adverse to seeing our own suffering because it tends to ignite a blaze of self-blame and regret. And we may be adverse to seeing suffering in others because we find it unbearable or distasteful, or we find it threatening to our own happiness. All of these possible reactions to the suffering in the word make us want to turn away from life.