It was simple, I stopped knowing what I couldn’t do or live up to.”

So where does wholeness come from? Well that’s one of the great questions. Where do we come from? Where does the universe come from?

When you are objecting to the moment, you are treating the moment as a between, a faux moment, a mistake, not a real moment to be inhabited. If you see that your thoughts are the source of your pain, freedom begins. You have been a character in a novel and suddenly you stop following the script and step out of the novel. No extra effort is needed;

The goal of the Zen koan is enlightenment, which is a profound change of heart. This change of heart makes the world seem like a different place; with it comes a freedom of mind and an awareness of the joy and kindness underlying daily life.

A friend who is curious about the way the mind works for happiness or unhappiness spent an afternoon with a Hindu teacher. During their conversation, he asked the teacher, somewhat rhetorically, “Don’t you know for sure at least that you are a human being?” The teacher replied, “In part.” This was not the response my friend expected. His train of t

Before the modern period, it was perhaps clearer that even an ordinary life can’t be fully conceived. Major events often bore neither a signature nor a sensible explanation. People met plague, famine, and war and didn’t have full information about what was going on. They might think that plague had something to do with rats or was related to an unf

The way she crossed the gap was to be curious, to wait with the conditions as they were and not to find fault with them. She couldn’t wake herself up but she began to pay attention in a deeper way and the waking up happened.

show a path in which kindness is part of the foundation of the mind; not one of its accoutrements, nor something to be cultivated. If it were an attainment, kindness could be taken away or lost. When you unpack all your motives and other people’s motives and get to the bottom of things, you find love. I know that this is a shocking thing to say but

The story in our family was that Mum was often difficult. I had evidence, memories; psychotherapists had agreed with these memories. But after sitting in that room, not wanting anyone to be different, I didn’t want anything about my life to have been different either. My sister and I started to tell each other Mum’s Famous Outrages—the “Can you bel