“Hopelessness means that we no longer have the spirit for holding our trip together.”

“The spiritual journey is not about heaven and finally getting to a place that is really swell.”

“Fear is the natural reaction to getting closer to the truth.”

“When it hurts so bad it’s because I’m hanging on so tight.”

“What we call obstacles are really the way the world and our entire experience teach us where we’re stuck.”

“Our fundamental situation is joyful.”

“Pain is not a punishment, pleasure is not a reward.”

“Giving up hope is encouragement to stick with yourself, to make friends with yourself, to return to the bare bones, no matter what’s going on.”

“Death in everyday life could also be defined as experiencing all the things we don’t want.”

“We learn to meet whatever arises with curiosity and not make it such a big deal.”

“We don’t sit in meditation to be good meditators. We sit in meditation so that we’ll be more awake in our lives.”

“Gloriousness and wretchedness need each other. One inspires us, the other softens us.”

“Like all explorers, we are drawn to discover what’s out there without knowing yet if we have the courage to face it.”

“If we learn to open our hearts, anyone, including the people who drive us crazy, can be our teacher.”

“You are the sky. Everything else – it’s just the weather.”

“Rather than letting our negativity get the better of us, we could acknowledge that right now we feel like a piece of shit and not be squeamish about taking a good look.”

“To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest.”

“Most of us do not take these situations as teachings. We automatically hate them. We run like crazy. We use all kinds of ways to escape — all addictions stem from this moment when we meet our edge and we just can’t stand it. We feel we have to soften it, pad it with something, and we become addicted to whatever it is that seems to ease the pain.”

“As human beings, not only do we seek resolution, but we also feel that we deserve resolution. However, not only do we not deserve resolution, we suffer from resolution. We don’t deserve resolution; we deserve something better than that. We deserve our birthright, which is the middle way, an open state of mind that can relax with paradox and ambiguity.”

“Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know.”

“We don’t set out to save the world; we set out to wonder how other people are doing and to reflect on how our actions affect other people’s hearts.”

“When you open yourself to the continually changing, impermanent, dynamic nature of your own being and of reality, you increase your capacity to love and care about other people and your capacity to not be afraid. You’re able to keep your eyes open, your heart open, and your mind open. And you notice when you get caught up in prejudice, bias, and aggression. You develop an enthusiasm for no longer watering those negative seeds, from now until the day you die. And, you begin to think of your life as offering endless opportunities to start to do things differently.”

“There is a story of a woman running away from tigers. She runs and runs and the tigers are getting closer and closer. When she comes to the edge of a cliff, she sees some vines there, so she climbs down and holds on to the vines. Looking down, she sees that there are tigers below her as well. She then notices that a mouse is gnawing away at the vine to which she is clinging. She also sees a beautiful little bunch of strawberries close to her, growing out of a clump of grass. She looks up and she looks down. She looks at the mouse. Then she just takes a strawberry, puts it in her mouth, and enjoys it thoroughly. Tigers above, tigers below. This is actually the predicament that we are always in, in terms of our birth and death. Each moment is just what it is. It might be the only moment of our life; it might be the only strawberry we’ll ever eat. We could get depressed about it, or we could finally appreciate it and delight in the preciousness of every single moment of our life.”

“If you follow your heart, you’re going to find that it is often extremely inconvenient.”