"Sitting meditation begins with good posture."

"As the twelfth-century Tibetian yogi Milarepa said when he heard of his student Gampopa's peak experiences, 'They are neither good nor bad. Keep meditating.'"

"Making good use of our limited time - the limited time from birth to death, as well as our limited time each day - is the key to developing inner steadiness and calm."

"Constantly apply cheerfulness, if for no other reason than because you are on this spiritual path. Have a sense of gratitude to everything, even difficult emotions, because of their potential to wake you up."

"The first noble truth says simply that it's part of being human to feel discomfort."

"A further sign of health is that we don't become undone by fear and trembling, but we take it as a message that it's time to stop struggling and look directly at what's threatening us."

"Meditation is a process of lightening up, of trusting the basic goodness of what we have and who we are, and of realizing that any wisdom that exists, exists in what we already have."

"One of the main discoveries of meditation is seeing how we continually run away from the present moment, how we avoid being here just as we are."

"A much more interesting, kind, adventurous, and joyful approach to life is to begin to develop curiosity, not caring whether the object of our inquisitiviness is bitter or sweet."

"The very first noble truth of the Buddha points out that suffering is inevitable for human beings as long as we believe that things last-that they don't disintegrate, that they can be counted on to satisfy our hunger for security."

"Meditation takes us just as we are, with our confusion and our sanity. This complete acceptance of ourselves as we are is called maitri, or unconditional friendliness, a simple, direct relationship with the way we are."

"In Buddha's opinion, to train in staying open and curious-to train in dissolving our assumptions and beliefs-is the best use of our human lives."

"It's helpful to always remind yourself that meditation is about opening and relaxing withwhatever arises, without picking and choosing."

"It's hard to know whether to laugh or to cry at the human predicament. Here we are with so much wisdom and tenderness, and-without even knowing it-we cover it over to protect ourselves from insecurity. Although we have the potential to experience the freedom of a butterfly, we mysteriously prefer the small and fearful cocoon of ego."

"When one of the emperors of China asked Bodhidharma (the Zen master who brought Zen from India to China) what enlightenment was, his answer was, 'Lots of space, nothing holy. Meditation is nothing holy. Therefore there's nothing that you think or feel that somehow gets put in the category of 'sin. There's nothing that you can think or feel that gets put in the category of 'bad. There's nothing that you can think or feel that gets put in the category of 'wrong. It's all good juicy stuff-the manure of waking up, the manure of achieving enlightenment, the art of living in the present moment."

"The meditation technique itself cultivate precision, gentleness, and the ability to let go - qualities that are innate within us."

"In his talk, Suzuki Roshi says that meditation and the whole process of finding your own true nature is one continuous mistake, and that rather than that being a reason for depression or discouragement, it's actually the motivation."

"This meditation is called nontheistic, which doesn't have anything to do with believing in God or not believing in God, but means that nobody but yourself can tell you what to accept and what to reject.The practice of meditation helps us to get to know this basic energy really well, with tremendous honesty and warmheartedness, and we begin to figure out for ourselves what is poison and what is medicin, which means something different for each of us."

"Authentic joy is not a euphoric state or a feeling of being high. Rather, it is a state of appreciation that allows us to participate fully in our lives. We train in rejoicing in the good fortune of self and others."

"People get into a heavy-duty sin and guilt trip, feeling that if things are going wrong, that means that they did something bad and they are being punished. That's not the idea at all. The idea of karma is that you continually get the teachings that you need to open your heart. To the degree that you didn't understand in the past how to stop protecting your soft spot, how to stop armoring your heart, you're given this gift of teachings in the form of your life, to give you everything you need to open further."

"When we resist change, it's called suffering. But when we can completely let go and not struggle against it, when we can embrace the groundlessness of our situation and relax into it's dynamic quality, that's called enlightenment."

"Yesterday I talked about cultivating precision, gentleness, and openess, and described how the meditation technique helps us to remember the qualities that we already possess."

"There's more to liberation than trying to avoid discomfort, more to lasting happiness than pursuing temporary pleasures, temporary relief."

"Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don't really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It's just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy."

"Words themselves are neutral. It's the charge we add to them that matters."

"Meditation practice isn't about trying to throw ourselves away and become something better."

"WE can learn to rejoice in even the smallest blessings our life holds. It is easy to miss our own good fortune, often happiness comes in ways we don't even notice."

"In order to work with difficult outer circumstances, we need to gather our inner strength. If even ten or twenty minutes of meditation a day helps us to do this, let's go for it!"

"We think that if we just meditated enough or jogged enough or ate perfect food, everything would be perfect. But from the point of view of someone who is awake, that's death. Seeking security or perfection, rejoicing in feeling confirmed and whole, self contained and comfortable, is some kind of death. It doesn't have any fresh air. There's no room for something to come in and interrupt all that. We are killing the moment by controlling our experience."

"Pointing directly at your own heart, you find Buddha."

"PATIENCE is the antidote to anger, a way to learn to love and care for whatever we meet on the path."

"Many religions have meditations on death to let it penetrate our thick skulls that life doesn't last forever."

"IN practicing meditation, we're not trying to live up to some kind of ideal-quite the opposite."

"Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It's a relationship between equals. Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others. Compassion becomes real when we recognize our shared humanity."

"Without giving up hope-that there's somewhere better to be, that there's someone better to be-we will never relax with where we are or who we are."

"The Buddha's principal message that day was that holding on to anything blocks wisdom. Any conclusion that we draw must be let go. The only way to fully understand the bodhichitta teachings, the only way to practice them fully, is to abide in the unconditional openness of the prajna, patiently cutting through all our tendencies to hang on."