So waking up is a bit like what an alcoholic or a drug addict experiences when they are coming out of their addiction. Most addicts only let go of their addiction when they’ve really seen that there’s no possibility of being happy and being an addict. Up until that time, most addicts are in a constant process of negotiation with life. They think, “

You can feel it. You’ve felt it your whole life. You’ve always known there’s something inside of you that’s sought to be born, fresh and real. You know there’s something inside you, far beyond your imagination, that’s been trying to break out and be. Everyone feels this inside. But to allow life to express itself in that way, with that much abandon

What you’re looking for is how your suffering, how the particular emotion you are experiencing, actually views your life, views what happened, and views what’s happening now. To do this, you need to get in touch with the story of your suffering. It is through these stories that we maintain our suffering, so we need to speak or write these stories d

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

Getting close simply means you stop running away. You don’t have to run toward it. You just have to stop running away. Then you’ll feel an intimacy. You may also feel a resistance, but you can choose to stay right there.

Even though pain and suffering can be generational, as we’re seeing, it can only be maintained in the present within the structures of our own mind—by believing our own thoughts of separation, blame, and condemnation. Coming to the end of suffering is really about beginning to see all of the ways that our mind maintains suffering through habitual p

The unknowing is itself aware, is itself conscious. The Tibetan Buddhists call this “self-luminosity.” The deepest reality of who we are is this open field of awareness that is self-luminous, self-knowing. In other words, who and what we truly are knows itself. It knows itself as a field of unknowing, as an open expanse of being. It’s not an uncons

So what’s the way out? How do we avoid becoming lost in our own thoughts, projections, beliefs, and opinions? How do we begin to find our way out of this whole matrix of suffering? To begin with, we have to make a simple, yet very powerful observation: All thoughts—good thoughts, bad thoughts, lovely thoughts, evil thoughts—occur within something.

So the truth is that most of us don’t really want to wake up. We don’t really want to end suffering. What we really want to do is manage our suffering, to have a little bit less of it, so that we can just go on with our lives as they are, unchanged, the way we want to live them, maybe feeling a little better about them.