“The seasons come and go, summer follows spring and fall follows summer and winter follows fall, and human beings are born and mature, have their middle age, begin to grow older and die, and everything has its cycles. Day follows night, night follows day. It is good to be part of all of this.” When you begin to have that kind of trust in basic crea

All you feel by being caught up like this is misery, as well as enormous resentment about life in general. How strange! Life is such a miracle, and a lot of the time we feel only resentment about how it’s all working out for us.

I would say that for four or five years practically the only teaching Rinpoche gave, in many different forms, under many different titles, was, “Stop shopping around and settle down and go deeply into one body of truth.” He taught that this continual dabbling around in spiritual things was just another form of materialism, trying to get comfortable

The opposite of samsara is when all the walls fall down, when the cocoon completely disappears and we are totally open to whatever may happen, with no withdrawing, no centralizing into ourselves. That is what we aspire to, the warrior’s journey.

So again, the first step is flashing some sense of openness and spaciousness, the second step is working with black in and white out, the third step is contacting something very real for us, and the fourth step is extending it out and being willing to do it for all sentient beings.

The first noble truth says simply that it’s part of being human to feel discomfort. We don’t even have to call it suffering anymore, we don’t even have to call it discomfort. It’s simply coming to know the fieriness of fire, the wildness of wind, the turbulence of water, the upheaval of earth, as well as the warmth of fire, the coolness and smoothn

“Buddhism doesn’t tell you what is false and what is true, but it encourages you to find out for yourself.”

The journey of awakening—the classical journey of the mythical hero or heroine—is one of continually coming up against big challenges and then learning how to soften and open.

Someone who is very angry also has a lot of energy; that energy is what’s so juicy about him or her. That’s the reason people love that person. The idea isn’t to try to get rid of your anger, but to make friends with it, to see it clearly with precision and honesty, and also to see it with gentleness. That means not judging yourself as a bad person