I'd known that I had the capacity to love, that I enjoyed seeing other people be happy, that I had a real awe and wonder about the beauty of this world.

Stories about ourselves and about the world continually arise in our minds and shape our beliefs about reality.

Awakening self-compassion is often the greatest challenge people face on the spiritual path.

The great gift of a spiritual path is coming to trust that you can find a way to true refuge. You realize that you can start right where you are, in the midst of your life, and find peace in any circumstance. Even at those moments when the ground shakes terribly beneath you—when there’s a loss that will alter your life forever—you can still trust that you will find your way home. This is possible because you’ve touched the timeless love and awareness that are intrinsic to who you are.

If there's a demand of being together in a certain way, those expectations and judgements take away from that space and create an edginess and a cramped-ness to the relationship.

Compassion can be described as letting ourselves be touched by the vulnerability and suffering that is within ourselves and all beings. The full flowering of compassion also includes action: Not only do we attune to the presence of suffering, we respond to it.

I sometimes call this our "spacesuit self" because we come into an environment that is difficult and challenging, where we're told to be different. We're told to jump over hoops to be loved and appreciated, so we have to develop spacesuit strategies to get approval and create ways to avoid being judged.