Start Where You Are: How to accept yourself and others

People get into a heavy-duty sin and guilt trip, feeling that if things are going wrong, that means they did something bad and they’re being punished.

when Juan or Juanita is getting to you, pushing every button, it’s not as simplistic as just eating it, just becoming a worm, “Okay, let them attack me.”

stop struggling against the fact that things are slipping through our fingers.

There’s a lot of joy as your burden begins to lessen, and it comes from doing anything that begins to change the pattern of fearing and wanting to resist what’s unpleasant.

There’s no way that someone else can tell you exactly what to do, because you’re the only one who knows where it’s torturing you, where your relationship with Juan or Juanita is getting into your guts. Others don’t know. They don’t know when you need to be more gentle,

In everything we read – whether it’s philosophy or dharma books or psychology – there’s the implication that we’re caught in some kind of very small perspective and that if we just did the right things, we’d begin to connect with a bigger world, a vaster world, different from the one we’re in now. One reason I wanted to talk about giving up all hop

People everywhere feel pain – jealousy, anger, being left out, feeling lonely. Everybody feels that exactly the way you feel it.

Basically the only way you can communicate with the Juans and Juanitas in your life is by taking the teachings and the practice very personally, not trusting anybody else’s interpretations, because you yourself have the wisdom within, and you yourself will find out how to open that door.

instead of talking to yourself for the next four days about them, you could stop talking to yourself.