If you let someone know you appreciate him or her, especially when you're going to disagree, it gets that person's defenses down.

The fear side can have us pull away and protect us, but it's really a withdrawal, a disassociation, a cutting off. Rather than the word detachment, I usually use the word non-attachment. That can be wholesome when we care and are completely engaged with each other but are not attached to things being a certain way.

We, like the Mother of the World, become the compassionate presence that can hold, with tenderness, the rising and passing waves of suffering.

I speak a lot about what I call "the trance of unworthiness" which is really epidemic in our culture, this sense of "I'm not enough," or "something's wrong with me." Most of us have some level of it because our culture has all these standards (handed down through our families) of what it means to be okay.

In any moment, no matter how lost we feel, we can take refuge in presence and love. We need only pause, breathe, and open to the experience of aliveness within us. In that wakeful openness, we come home to the peace and freedom of our natural awareness.

Relaxation is the doorway to both wisdom and compassion.

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.