Falling into Grace: Insights on the End of Suffering

I asked her once again, “Experience the same memory, but withhold your story, withhold the conclusions your mind has made. Don’t judge yourself for making them; just see if you can experience the story without them.” Once again, she closed her eyes and imagined what had happened, and then she opened her eyes, and I said, “Before you tell yourself a

What we’ve really got to do is stop listening to our minds. We instead need to listen to the silence inside, listen in that place where our listening takes us beyond what we think we know. This is true even when we’re in dense states of suffering, when we’re very much tied up in a knot, when we’re in turmoil, deep sadness, grief, or depression. Str

Beyond even any teaching, though, the aspect of spiritual life that is the most profound is the element of grace. Grace is something that comes to us when we somehow find ourselves completely available, when we become openhearted and open-minded, and are willing to entertain the possibility that we may not know what we think we know. In this gap of

None of our stories, even our most intelligent stories, are ever as real as what is.

One of the primary qualities of this space of unknowing is that it is aware; there’s a completely natural awareness or consciousness flooding the whole of experience. Awareness simply means that there is a pure perception of whatever you’re experiencing.

I was contemplating my spiritual life, and I suddenly had the impulse to pray. At that time, praying wasn’t something that I did very often, but somehow, I felt this impulse. I said to the universe, “Give me whatever is necessary for me to awaken. I don’t care what it takes. I don’t care if the rest of my life is one of ease, and I don’t care if th

We become deeply grounded in silence. The nature of this silence is a lack of conflict with life, and the more we open to this state of nonconflict, to this state of inner stillness, we begin to fall into the grace of a different dimension of being—a dimension rooted in a deep intimacy with our own lives and with existence itself.

The question becomes: What is the correct, or most natural, relationship with thought?

Can we be honest enough to look directly at the nature of our own mind and ask, “What do we really know?”