May it encourage you to settle down with your life and take these teachings on honesty, kindness, and bravery to heart. If your life is chaotic and stressful, there’s plenty of advice here for you.

If we don’t look into hope and fear, seeing a thought arise, seeing the chain reaction that follows—if we don’t train in sitting with that energy without getting snared by the drama, then we’re always going to be afraid. The world we live in, the people we meet, the animals emerging from doorways—everything will become increasingly threatening. So

“Meditate on whatever provokes resentment” and “Lean into the sharp points.” While Trungpa Rinpoche was still in Tibet, his teacher Khenpo Gangshar trained him in this

At the level of mind, we break samaya by making things “wrong” or making things “right.” We think we have some choice to make, some alternative to just hanging out with not solving anything, not resolving anything. We could say that, at the level of mind, breaking samaya is feeling that we must come up with a solution to a problem—or feeling that

Many people say that meditation is not enough, that we need therapy and support groups to deal with our most stuck patterns. They feel strongly that the dharma doesn’t quite penetrate our confusion deeply enough.

Begin the journey without hope of getting ground under your feet. Begin with hopelessness.

When you wake up in the morning and out of nowhere comes the heartache of alienation and loneliness, could you use that as a golden opportunity? Rather than persecuting yourself or feeling that something terribly wrong is happening, right there in the moment of sadness and longing, could you relax and touch the limitless space of the human heart?

Did we close down, or did we open up? Did we feel resentful and bitter, or did we soften? Did we become wiser or more stupid? As a result of our pain, did we know more about what it is to be human, or did we know less? Were we more critical of our world or more generous? Were we penetrated by the arrows, or did we turn them into flowers?

Jean-Paul Sartre said that there are two ways to go to the gas chamber, free or not free. This is our choice in every moment. Do we relate to our circumstances with bitterness or with openness?