The Deepest Acceptance

What I do see is that many people are seeking. They are trying to escape what they think and feel in the moment. They are deeply resisting present experience, but they don’t realize this is what they are doing. So it feels like suffering is just happening to them, almost as if it came from outside of them and they are victims of it.

My depression was my experience of not being able to hold up my own life, and feeling depressed (pressed down) by my life as a result. I see now that we are all pressed down by the weight of our own lives, the weight of our history and our imagined futures. In that sense, we are all depressed to some extent! It’s only when it becomes virtually impo

We imagine that there is a solid and separate me—a separate entity here at the center of life, an entity that is in charge of life—but upon investigation, that assumption crumbles. The illusion is seen through: what I really am is intimate with life itself. It’s not that the wave doesn’t exist—it’s that the wave is inseparable from the ocean.

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!

The moment you come to a mental conclusion about a sensation, in a sense you’ve stopped seeing and feeling, really feeling, what’s actually there. You’ve moved into a mental story about your experience. So come back to what’s actually happening and take another look now.

We can see the messiness and beauty of day-to-day human existence as something to be avoided, transcended, or even obliterated, or we can see it for what it really is: a secret and constant invitation to wake up now, even if we believe we already woke up yesterday.

Even in the midst of the noisiest thoughts, there is something here that is very quiet—something that is deeply at peace. It’s what you are. It watches all thoughts as they come and go. It allows all thoughts to come and go.

Suffering or stress or psychological discomfort is no longer something bad or evil to be transcended or destroyed; it is a unique opportunity to see what you are still at war with, what you are still seeking.

The truth is that their pain, in this moment, is real to them, and if we are to begin to find the wholeness within present experience, we must first validate and honor that present experience, no matter how illusory we perceive it to be, and, from there, move to find out what is really true. I meet you in your dream, and we explore the dream togeth