Start Where You Are: How to accept yourself and others

People have plenty of reasons to be angry.

Underneath all that craving or aversion or jealousy or feeling wretched about yourself, underneath all that hopelessness and despair and depression, there’s something extremely soft, which is called bodhichitta.

Buddhism itself is all about empowering yourself, not about getting what you want.

Ishi seemed to be fully awake. He was completely at home with himself and the world, even when it changed so dramatically almost overnight.

You can feel like the world’s most hopeless basket case, but that feeling is your wealth, not something to be thrown out or improved upon.

Ishi lived in northern California at the beginning of the century. Everyone in his whole tribe had been methodically killed,

The image of the bodhisattva vow could be, “Not afraid of others.” When you take the bodhisattva vow you open the windows and doors and invite all sentient beings as your guests. Having understood the futility and pain of always holding on to yourself, you want to take the next step and begin to work with others.

We will fall flat on our faces again and again, we will continue to feel inadequate, and we can use these experiences to wake up, just as they did.

I have experimented with this, because I didn’t believe that it would work. I thought it couldn’t possibly be true, and because my doubt was so strong, for a while it seemed to me that it didn’t work.

The people and situations in our lives can remind us to catch neurosis as neurosis, to see when we’re in our room under the covers, to see when we’ve pulled the shades, locked the door, and are determined to stay there.