If we look carefully at our actions—what we say or do, what we refrain from saying or doing—we can sense within them an urge toward wholeness, toward happiness.

A change to one element affects the entire system. From this vantage point, interdependence is seen as the very fabric of every experience. A systems approach tends to focus on the relationships, structures, and feedback loops that make up the whole. That way we are constantly learning, seeing the problem as an ever-changing process.

with any traumatic event, we might well need time to more fully integrate, in body, mind, and spirit that “it happened.” It’s easy, along the way, to want to overexplain a shattering situation or take refuge in abstractions.

The sati part (mindfulness) is sometimes called bare attention, a single-pointed awareness of what is happening to us and in us, without falling sway to interpretation, to holding on or pushing away.

How do you keep going in your efforts toward change, when immediate success is not in sight, when you’re awfully tired, when you’re frustrated? Do you have a refuge in something bigger than the current circumstance? Where can we connect to something larger than what’s in our immediate experience, larger than the small-minded views the world may be

Those shocks snap us out of our hermetic dream state, prompting us to look more deeply within ourselves and at the world around us. It may take something compelling to wake us up, to turn us away from that half-asleep state and away from the easy answers society offers us about how best to live: consume more, compete more, move faster, get ahead of

This tendency to regard people as “other”—as categorically different from ourselves—extends also to places and things: they are not ours; they are alien to us.

Often we see ourselves as isolated, independent, sealed off from others, and in that separation, we struggle to seize control somehow.

As we respond to our own pain with more presence and compassion, the energy we have for responding to the pain of others increases dramatically, as does our sense of connection and care.