Our suffering is rooted in our unwillingness to feel what we feel, to experience what we are experiencing right now. Suffering is there in our war with life as it is.

Without the story, do you really have any way of knowing what pain is? And we can go even further: without the story, do you really have any way of knowing what sensations actually are? Without the story, life is a total mystery, isn’t it? Yes, the mystery is there even within the experience of pain. Pain does not destroy or block mystery; it is

Here’s something that’s crucial to understand: In reality, feelings have no opposite. Energy in the body has no opposite. Life itself has no opposite.

My depression had everything to do with the way I saw the world—with my judgments of it, with my beliefs about it, with my demands about how this moment should be. Underneath my attempt to control life through thinking was my fear of change, of loss, and, ultimately, of death. My resistance to life took me to the extreme—suicidal depression—but we

If you want to suffer, compare this moment with your image of how it should be!

let’s just say that from a place of deep acceptance of the way things are, in seeing the inherent perfection of life itself, one is still totally free to do what one is moved to do—to help, to change things, to make a difference. It’s just that our actions are no longer coming from the root assumption that reality is broken and needs to be fixed

All thoughts and feelings are allowed to come and go in what you are. • Deep acceptance is not something you achieve—it’s what you are in your essence. What you are is the open space in which all waves of experience are allowed to come and go.

What you are is simply the capacity to think anything and to feel anything, but you are not defined by any of the thoughts and feelings that appear.

Suffering is always an invitation to discover, in the moment, what we are not deeply accepting and to see that what we are not accepting is already accepted.