Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (and World Peace)

Failure is the building block of success.

Mingyur Rinpoche has a poetic metaphor for describing it, he says the moment you can see a raging river, it means you are already rising above it. Similarly, the moment you can see an emotion, you are no longer fully engulfed in it.

Your breath is like New York City for your attention—if your attention can make it here, it can make it anywhere.

The key insight here is that grasping and aversion are separate from sensation and perception. They arise so closely together that we do not normally notice the difference.

As we deepen our self-awareness, we eventually arrive at a very important key insight: we are not our emotions.

There is the experience of physical pain, and there is the separate experience of aversion. The untrained mind lumps them into one indivisible experience, but the trained mind sees two distinct experiences, one leading to the arising of the other.

For example, I was told that in Buddhist psychology, there is an important difference between anger and indignation: anger arises out of powerlessness, while indignation arises out of power.

wilting flowers do not cause suffering; it is the unrealistic desire that flowers not wilt that causes suffering.

The experience itself causes no suffering, but our clinging on to them and our desperate hoping that they do not go away cause suffering.