My style was driving everyone else crazy, and I couldn’t find anywhere to hide.

each time he dropped his resentment, depression, and pride, he was dropping his ancient habitual baggage.

Scrambling for security has never brought anything but momentary joy. It’s like changing the position of our legs in meditation. Our legs hurt from sitting cross-legged, so we move them. And then we feel, “Phew!

The first thing that happens in meditation is that we start to see what’s happening. Even though we still run away and we still indulge, we see what we’re doing clearly. One would think that our seeing it clearly would immediately make it just disappear, but it doesn’t. So for quite a long time, we just see it clearly. To the degree that we’re will

Then Marpa gave him the teachings and their relationship entered a new phase of tenderness and warmth.

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.

pleasure and pain, loss and gain, praise and blame, fame and disgrace.

When something hurts in life, we don’t usually think of it as our path or as the source of wisdom. In fact, we think that the reason we’re on the path is to get rid of this painful feeling. (“When I get to L.A., I won’t feel this way anymore.”) At that level of wanting to get rid of our feeling, we naively cultivate a subtle aggression against ours

the day I understood without question that we create our situation by how we use our mind, by how we keep patterning our responses to life in the same old, very