Keep your practice very simple and don't be too ambitious.

We do look for inspiration amongst our own sex. Why not? You go into temples and they're full of all the lineage lamas who are male. What message does that give to a young girl, except that somehow she got trapped in the wrong body because of bad things she did in a past life?

Since I was a small child, I'd believed we were inherently perfect, and that we had to keep coming back again and again until we recognized our innate perfection.

The Buddha himself said, "I still use conceptual thinking, but I'm not formed by it." And that's the Buddha.

Keep your practice very simple and don't be too ambitious.

If you want to be a doctor, you may say, There are all these beings, they're sick, they're dying, I've got to go out and help them. And so you grab a bag full of scalpels and medicine and rush off. Even though your motivation is very pure, you end up harming beings because you don't know what you're doing.

We have to transform those ordinary actions of our day into dharma practice because otherwise nothing is going to move.