"Trying to impose our personal agenda on someone else's experience is the shadow side of love, while real love recognizes that life unfolds at its own pace."

"When we set an intention to explore our emotional hot spots, we create a pathway to real love."

"With our close friends, family members, and lovers, we hope to create a special world, one in which we can expect to be treated fairly, with care, tenderness, and compassion."

"We long for permanence but everything in the known universe is transient. That's a fact but one we fight."

"Equanimity can be hard to talk about."

"I think so many people tend to think of faith as blind adherence to a dogma or unquestioned surrender to an authority figure, and the result is losing self-respect and losing our own sense of what is true. And I don't think of faith in those terms at all."

"Love seems to open and expand us right down to the cellular level, while fear causes us to contract and withdraw into ourselves."

"Causing harm is never just a one-way street."

"If you're reading these words, perhaps it's because something has kicked open the door for you, and you're ready to embrace change. It isn't enough to appreciate change from afar, or only in the abstract, or as something that can happen to other people but not to you. We need to create change for ourselves, in a workable way, as part of our everyday lives."

"Laughing at your pettiness probably works better than scolding yourself for it."

"Our ability to connect with others is innate, wired into our nervous systems, and we need connection as much as we need physical nourishment."

"Every single moment is expressive of the truth of our lives when we know how to look."

"Forgiveness is a personal process that doesn't depend on us having direct contact with the people who have hurt us."

"Loving kindness is the practice of offering to oneself and others wishes to be happy, peaceful, healthy, strong."

"It is a state of peace to be able to accept things as they are. This is to be at home in our own lives. We see that this universe is much too big to hold on to, but it is the perfect size for letting go. Our hearts and minds become that big, and we can actually let go. This is the gift of equanimity."

"At times, reality is love's great challenge. When our old stories and dreams are shattered, our first instinct may be to resist, deny, or cling to the way things were. But if we loosen our grip, often what fills the space is a tender forgiveness and the potential for a new and different kind of love."

"You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection."

"Ask yourself, 'who is the one suffering from this anger? The person who has harmed me has gone on to live their life (or perhaps has died), while I am the one sitting here feeling the persecution, burning and constriction of anger. Out of compassion for myself, to ease my own heart, may I let go."

"All beings want to be happy, yet so very few know how. It is out of ignorance that any of us cause suffering, for ourselves or for others."

"Not everyone wants to take up meditation, but most people can feel an alignment with values like mutual respect, insightful investigation, listening to one another.Meditation is a way to help those values become real in day-to-day life, helping people to understand themselves more and more and have a way to not get lost in old patterns."

"Shame weakens us. It can make us frightened to take on something new. We start to withdraw from whatever might give us pleasure, self-esteem, or a sense of our value."

"Buddhism has a term for the happiness we feel at someone else's success or good fortune. Sympathetic joy, as it is known, invites us to celebrate for others."

"To reteach a thing its loveliness is the nature of metta. Through lovingkindness, everyone & everything can flower again from within."

"With the practice of meditation we can develop this ability to more fully love ourselves and to more consistently love others."

"The key to cultivating confidence in ourselves is understanding our right to make the truth our own."

"Meditation is not about what's happening, it is about how we're relating to what's happening."

"Meditation trains the mind the way physical exercise strengthens the body."

"What makes awe such a powerful call to love is that it's disruptive. It sneaks up on us. It doesn't ask our permission to wow us; it just does. Awe can arise from a single glance, a sound, a gesture."

"A lack of real love for ourselves is one of the most constricting, painful conditions we can know."

"Mindfulness is so much wiser and more robust than our inner critic."

"We can discover the capacity of the mind to be aware, to love, to begin again."

"By practicing meditation we establish love, compassion, sympathetic joy & equanimity as our home."

"Our practice rather than being about killing the ego is about simply discovering our true nature."

"Keeping secrets is a consequential act for all involved."

"Even as we recognize our resentment, bitterness, or jealousy, we can also honor our own wish to be happy, to feel free."

"Because the development of inner calm & energy happens completely within & isn't dependent on another person or a particular situation, we begin to feel a resourcefulness and independence that is quite beautiful-and a huge relief."

"Mindfulness may help you gain insight into your role in conflicts with others, it won't single-highhandedly help you resolve them."

"Telling the story, acknowledging what has happened and how you feel, is often a necessary part of forgiveness."

"What happens in our hearts is our field of freedom. As long as we carry old wounds and anger in our hearts, we continue to suffer. Forgiveness allows us to move on."

"Distraction wastes our energy, concentration restores it."

"When we truly allow ourselves to feel our own pain, over time it comes to seem less personal. We start to recognize that what we've perceived as our pain is, at a deeper level, the pain inherent in human existence."

"When we can step back even briefly from our hurt, sorrow, and anger, when we put our faith in the possibility of change, we create the possibility for non-judgmental inquiry that aims for healing rather than victory."

"Love is a living capacity within us that is always present, even when we don't sense it."

"In more ways than any of us can name, love is wrapped up with the idea of expectation."

"In order to free ourselves from our assumptions about love, we must ask ourselves what long-held, often buried assumptions are and then face them, which takes courage, humility, and kindness."

"Sympathetic joy is a practice. It takes time and effort to free ourselves of the scarcity story that most of us have learned along the way, the idea that happiness is a competition, and that someone else is grabbing all the joy."

"The first step toward feeling compassion for others is to set the intention to try it out."

"As we explore new ways of loving and being loved by others, we need to equip ourselves with open, pliant minds; we need to be willing to investigate, experiment, and evaluate as we approach a topic we thought we knew so much about."

"To sense which gifts to accept & which to leave behind is our path to discovering freedom."

"Concepts such as loving kindness should never be used as weapons against our real feelings."