It is exceedingly difficult to maintain a sense of absence without turning that absence into some kind of presence

Uncovering your real desires can be terrifying. It can also set you spectacularly free.

We are looking for a way to feel more real, but we do not realize that to feel more real we have to push ourselves further into the unknown.

It’s one of my theories that when people give you advice, they’re really just talking to themselves in the past.

Buddhism teaches us that happiness does not come from any kind of acquisitiveness, be it material or psychological. Happiness comes from letting go. In Buddhism, the impenetrable, separate, and individuated self is more of the problem than the solution.

Anger is sign that something needs to change.

If aspects of the person remain undigested-cut off, denied, projected, rejected, indulged, or otherwise unassimilated-they become the points around which the core forces of greed, hatred and delusion attach themselves.

I have come to see that our problem is that we don't know what happiness is. We confuse it with a life uncluttered by feelings of anxiety, rage, doubt, and sadness. But happiness is something entirely different. It's the ability to receive the pleasant without grasping and the unpleasant without condemning.

To free desire from the tendency to cling, we have to be willing to stumble over ourselves.

Depressed people think they know themselves, but maybe they only know depression.

The willingness to face traumas - be they large, small, primitive or fresh - is the key to healing from them. They may never disappear in the way we think they should, but maybe they don’t need to. Trauma is an ineradicable aspect of life. We are human as a result of it, not in spite of it.

We are what we think, having become what we thought.

One of the age-old truths about love is that while it offers unparalleled opportunities for union and the lifting of ego boundaries, it also washes us up on the shores of the loved one's otherness. Sooner or later, love makes us feel inescapably separate.

To be free, to come to terms with our lives, we have to have a direct experience of ourselves as we really are, warts and all.

As my Buddhist teachers have shown me, wisdom emerges in the space around words as much as from language itself.