The Wisdom of No Escape: And the Path of Loving Kindness

It was completely true: if you can live with the sadness of human life (what Rinpoche often called the tender heart or genuine heart of sadness), if you can be willing to feel fully and acknowledge continually your own sadness and the sadness of life, but at the same time not be drowned in it, because you also remember the vision and power of the G

All the way up this mountain there were places where people met their edge and just froze and couldn’t go any farther.

The effect of this month of meditation that we are beginning will be as if, at the end of each day, someone were to play a video of you back to yourself and you could see it all. You would wince quite often and say “Ugh!” You probably would see that you do all those things for which you criticize all those people you don’t like in your life, all th

Tonglen takes a lot of courage to do. Interestingly enough, it also gives you a lot of courage. You start out maybe with one thimbleful of courage and a tremendous aspiration to want to open to your world and to be of benefit to yourself and others. You know that that means you’re going to find yourself in places where all your buttons will be push

To put it simply, using your belief system this way creates a situation in which you choose to be blind instead of being able to see, to be deaf instead of being able to hear, to be dead rather than alive, asleep rather than awake.

Resting evenly just stresses the basic attitude that meditation is about developing a thoroughly good friendship with oneself, a completely honest, openhearted relationship with oneself. Traditionally there’s a little verse that goes with this teaching, which says, “As swans swim on the lake and vultures roam in the charnel ground, you can let your

Working with obstacles is life’s journey. The warrior is always coming up against dragons. Of course the warrior gets scared, particularly before the battle. It’s frightening. But with a shaky, tender heart the warrior realizes that he or she is just about to step into the unknown, and then goes forth to meet the dragon. The warrior realizes that t

He said, “I’m always suspicious of the ones who say everything’s going well. If you think that things are going well, then it’s usually some kind of arrogance. If it’s too easy for you, you just relax. You don’t make a real effort, and therefore you never find out what it is to be fully human.” So he encouraged me by saying that as long as you have

This is probably one of the most amazing tools that you could be given, the ability to just let things go, not to be caught in the grip of your own angry thoughts of passionate thoughts or worried thoughts or depressed thoughts.