When we see the secret beauty of anyone, including ourselves, we see past our judgment and fear into the core of who we truly are - not an entrapped self but the radiance of goodness.

I registered the dukkha of self-aversion with such clarity that I knew there was no freedom unless I could love this life without holding back. This didn't mean I was going to ignore my flaws and stop seeking to improve what I could. But in the deepest way, I was not going to fixate on the conclusion that something was wrong with me.

Nothing is wrong - whatever is happening is just "real life."

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

If our hearts are ready for anything, we can open to our inevitable losses, and to the depths of our sorrow. We can grieve our lost loves, our lost youth, our lost health, our lost capacities. This is part of our humanness, part of the expression of our love for life.

The Buddha never intended to make desire itself the problem. When he said craving causes suffering, he was referring not to our natural inclination as living beings to have wants and needs, but to our habit of clinging to experience that must, by nature, pass away.

Feeling compassion for ourselves in no way releases us from responsibility for our actions. Rather, it releases us from the self-hatred that prevents us from responding to our life with clarity and balance.