If you don’t try to stop whatever is going on in your mind, but merely observe it, eventually you’ll begin to feel a tremendous sense of relaxation, a vast sense of openness within your mind - which is in fact your natural mind, the naturally unperturbed background against which various thoughts come and go.

Happiness and unhappiness are not primarily created by the material world or the physical body. First and foremost, they are decisions of the mind.

Meditation is really quite simple. All we have to do is embrace each experience with awareness and open our hearts fully to the present moment. When we are completely at ease with our own being, the ripples of awareness naturally spread out in all directions, touching the lives of everyone we meet.

Not recognizing natural mind is simply an example of the mind's unlimited capacity to create whatever it wants.

The expectations you bring to meditation practice are often the greatest obstacles you will encounter.

It’s so easy to think that we’re the only ones who suffer, while other people are somehow immune to pain, as though they’d been born with some kind of special knowledge about being happy, that, through some cosmic accident, we never received. Thinking in this way, we make our own problems seem much bigger than they really are.

If you're determined to think of yourself as limited, fearful, vulnerable, or scarred by past experience, know only that you have chosen to do so. The opportunity to experience yourself differently is always available.