Living Beautifully: with Uncertainty and Change

As Shantideva, an eighth-century Buddhist master, wrote in The Way of the Bodhisattva: All that I possess and use Is like the fleeting vision of a dream. It fades into the realms of memory; And fading, will be seen no more.

an emotional state like loneliness, depression, or anxiety, you open yourself fully to the sensation, free of interpretation. If you’ve tried this approach with physical pain, you know that the result can be quite miraculous. When you give your full attention to your knee or your back or your head—whatever hurts—and drop the good/bad, right/wrong s

Acknowledge the feeling, give it your full, compassionate, even welcoming attention, and even if it’s only for a few seconds, drop the story line about the feeling. This allows you to have a direct experience of it, free of interpretation. Don’t fuel it with concepts or opinions about whether it’s good or bad. Just be present with the sensation. Wh

“saving yourself from samsaric neurosis.”

In Buddhism we call the notion of a fixed identity “ego clinging.”

The first of the commitments, traditionally called the Pratimoksha Vow, is the foundation for personal liberation. This is a commitment to doing our best to not cause harm with our actions or words or thoughts, a commitment to being good to each other. It provides a structure within which we learn to work with our thoughts and emotions and to refra

Repression is denial of what’s

The discomfort associated with groundlessness, with the fundamental ambiguity of being human, comes from our attachment to wanting things to be a certain way.

The purpose of the spiritual path is to unmask, to take off our armor. When that happens, it feels like a crisis because it is a crisis—a fixed-identity crisis.