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

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

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.

One small shift in the way we each conduct ourselves, and the crystal lattice structure of the world is already different.

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

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.

Failure is the building block of success.

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.

The happiest state can only be achieved with compassion, which requires engagement in real life with real people. Hence, our meditation practices cannot be perfected outside of real life; there has to be a combination of seclusion from the world (to deepen the calmness) and engagement with the world (to deepen the compassion). If you are a deep med

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.