“The journey goes down, not up.” She is saying that spiritual awakening is not like climbing up a mountain on our own and leaving others behind. We are letting go of our attachments, even to climbing the mountain.

I couldn’t distract myself by reading about practice rather than doing it.

Pay attention to how you live. Pay attention to your actions. Are your actions kind? Are your actions honest? Are your actions supported by the desire to help beings, to benefit beings? Are your actions selfish or generous? How are you living this life?

we come to practice because we have realized in ourselves the fear and the suffering, and we want to do something to alleviate them. We want to be there not just for ourselves but for everyone else who shares this human life, this precious human life.

if I wanted to work for peace, I should try to find some peaceful way to do it.

The awakened mind of buddha is available to each one of us. But we have to take down the walls. We have to clear out any ill will that we can notice. We have to find out what’s feeding it and how we can disconnect it from our lives and put it down. To see what’s separating us from all of those around us. To recognize greed, anger, and delusion when

to feel the joy and the love that can come from living from the source of your being.

What is the effort that daffodils make in order to bloom?

And as I continued to practice and to talk with other students of the buddha dharma, I found that many people share the conditioning that leads us to think that there’s something wrong with us. If we could only get, do, or be something more, then we would be all right. It’s so easy for us to get the idea that there’s something wrong with us. And it