Compassion grows in us when we know how the energy of love is available all around us.

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

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.

Resilience is based on compassion for ourselves as well as compassion for others

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

We are all too often told by someone that we are too old, too young, too different, too much the same, and those comments can be devastating.

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.