cultivating the capability to be engaged with the reality of my life.

We resist seeing or hearing things we are opposed to or are afraid of. When we try, we find it harder than we imagined to settle the mind enough to let in what we resist or feel threatened by.

our work is to love the world just as it is. Because our discriminating mind is constantly thinking of improvements for the world—how I should be, how you should be—to love the world as it is means to completely accept those thoughts and also our regrets about how the world is. Loving the world as it is, is being willing to be in the only world we

REALIZING YOU ARE BUDDHA is a very sobering experience. This wasn’t exactly the Buddha you had in mind when you came to practice.

begins. In our parenting group someone said, “Practice is when you can’t walk away from your crying child, no matter how frustrated you are.”

Moving in accord with circumstances, we do not act on things, but with circumstances.

The air is sharp and cold; we know we are alive. We are here.

We are all a configuration of attributes, qualities, aspirations, and conditions, and at the same time we are completely free of all that. We are our causes and conditions, and simultaneously we are free of them.

The wish to respond differently must be as deep and strong as the habitual response. The path to that depth arises from seeing, again and again, how we repeat ourselves—and vowing to do it differently.