True happiness is born of letting go of what is unnecessary.

It's easy for us to feel separate from other people and from other forms of life, especially if we don't have a reliable connection to our own inner world. Without insight into our internal cycles of pleasure and pain, desires and fears, there is a strong sense of being removed, apart or disconnected. When we do have an understanding of our inner lives, it provides an intuitive opening, even without words, to the ties that exist between ourselves and others.

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.

There are many different ways to practice meditation; it's good to experiment until you find one that seems to suit you.

We can travel a long way in life and do many things, but our deepest happiness is not born from accumulating new experiences. it is born from letting go of what is unnecessary, and knowing ourselves to be always at home.

Training our mind through meditation does not mean forcibly subjugating it or beating it into shape.

I prefer to think of faith, as Coleridge says of poetry, not as the taking up of belief but as "the willing suspension of disbelief". . . a willingness to be open, to explore, to investigate.