The Deepest Acceptance

When you feel totally powerless and unable to control the moment, lashing out and demonstrating power can provide some relief, if only temporarily. Attacking another human being is the perfect way to distract yourself from your own deeply uncomfortable feelings—feelings you simply don’t want to allow in yourself. It is often when we feel most helpl

Can you find the one who hears, the one who sees, the one who thinks? Or is the reality much, much simpler—that sounds appear, seeing happens, thoughts arise—and it’s simply another thought that says, “I’m doing that!”

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

Perhaps this was not my life to hold up in the first place. Perhaps I wasn’t really who I thought I was. Perhaps true freedom had nothing to do with being a better wave in the ocean, with perfecting my story of myself. Perhaps freedom was all about waking up from the dream that we are separate waves in the first place and embracing all that appears

It is crucial to understand this: our search for something abstract in the future—enlightenment, wealth, power, success, love—is always deeply rooted in present-moment resistance. Our search for future completeness is always rooted in an experience of present incompleteness. Present-moment incompleteness is where all our suffering and seeking begin

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.

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

The spiritual teacher Nisargadatta Maharaj made this beautiful statement: “Wisdom says I am nothing. Love says I am everything. Between the two my life flows.”

what you are—as the wide-open space in which all thoughts, sensations, sounds, and feelings are allowed to appear and disappear—is also some-how inseparable from those thoughts, sensations, sounds, and feelings. You are not your thoughts, but at the same time all thoughts are allowed to come and go in the intimacy that you are. What you are is not