I sometimes feel tremendous compassion and helplessness.

My mother was a spiritualist. We had weekly séances at our house with a neighbor who was a medium and various friends, and so I was brought up with the idea that there are many realms of being all around us. So that prepared me for Buddhism, and especially Tibetan Buddhism with all its talk of different realms and dimensions of being.

To become effortless takes a lot of effort. It's good to compare it to learning an instrument or learning a sport.

People get very deep experiences and they think they're enlightened. That's not enlightenment, that's just some realization.

You have to recharge your batteries.

As a human being, we have everything we need. It's enough suffering to give us incentive to go on, but not so much that we don't know where to turn.

Many people are benefiting beings, but from a dharma point of view, if you are a dharma practitioner, then the first priority is to get yourself together.