The whole of meditation practice can be essentialized into these 3 crucial points: Bring your mind home. Release. And relax!

It is compassion, then, that is the best protection; it is also, as the great masters of the past have always known, the source of all healing.

More important than finding the teacher is finding and following the truth of the teaching.

Our lives are lived in intense and anxious struggle, in a swirl of speed and aggression, in competing, grasping, possessing and achieving, forever burdening ourselves with extraneous activities and preoccupations.

Without our familiar props, we are faced with just ourselves, a person we do not know, an unnerving stranger with whom we have been living all the time but we never really wanted to meet. Isn't that why we have tried to fill every moment of time with noise and activity, however boring or trivial, to ensure that we are never left in silence with this stranger on our own?

We are fragmented into so many different aspects. We don't know who we really are, or what aspects of ourselves we should identify with or believe in. So many contradictory voices, dictates, and feelings fight for control over our inner lives that we find ourselves scattered everywhere, in all directions, leaving nobody at home.

The gift of learning to meditate is the greatest gift you can give yourself in this lifetime.