Original Love: The Four Inns on the Path of Awakening

as long as we are unable to be at rest in the present when it includes difficult feelings—making it impossible to tend to those feelings—it will be a challenge to find ease in the simple fact of being alive.

“As we begin to re-experience a visceral reconnection with the needs of our bodies, there is a brand-new capacity to warmly love the self. We are able to experience an immediate and intrinsic pleasure in self-care.”

Our resting condition, or “default,” is not very restful after all. Not only do we get caught up in thoughts, but also these thoughts tend to be about the past or future, and often generate regret or anxiety. They trigger our sympathetic nervous system, and we get uncomfortably hyped up and uneasy.

Normally, we cling to an intuitive sense of being “me,” but we can come to see that the sense of me is nothing more than a set of stories in the mind. Together they conjure up a kind of genie—“Me.” That is to say, the sense of me is not as stable or solid as we take it to be, and depends on an implicit narrative repeatedly generated by our thinking

That is the basic meaning of the word dharma—the teachings that can guide us.

Support after all is a form of love.

And the first of its directives is to have a clear understanding of suffering and its causes, and of well-being and its causes. This means you have to have a reliable map.

the “Four Ennobling Truths” of Buddhism: There is suffering. Suffering is generated by craving. Craving can cease. There is a path of practice that leads to the end of craving.

The great purpose of human beings may be just to experience love—and then act accordingly, to spread that love the best we can.