Look at your life. Look at the ways in which you define who you are and what you’re capable of achieving. Look at your goals. Look at the pressures applied by the people around you and the culture in which you were raised. Look again. And again. Keep looking until you realize, within your own experience, that you’re so much more than who you believe you are. Keep looking until you discover the wondrous heart, the marvelous mind, that is the very basis of your being.

The true bodhisattva spirit grows out of this personal sense of freedom. You discover that you don't feel so needy anymore. You don't crave another refueling - with shamatha or with other people's love and attention - because you know within yourself how to be free, how to be confident. With this sense of security and freedom, you begin to direct your attention to the needs of others. The compassion expands.

Your emotional understanding about the preciousness of your human birth comes through conscious, repetitive mind training.

A mantra is basically a means of talking with your thoughts and feelings. It's a time-honored method sometimes referred to as prayer, but really it's an opening of a conversation between the heart and the mind.

The point is to be free, not to be crazy.

Simply let experience take place very freely, so that your open heart is suffused with the tenderness of true compassion.

Let yourself become that space that welcomes any experience without judgement.