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Kindle Notes & Highlights
“Always meditate on whatever provokes resentment”—
“May this person who is driving me crazy enjoy happiness and be free of suffering.”
we watch without judgment to see if our heart opens or closes down.
when we harden our heart against anyone, we hurt ourselves.
Abiding with the physical sensation is radically different from sticking to the story line.
train yourself to have a kind heart always and in all situations.
Discomfort of any kind also becomes the basis for practice. We breathe in knowing that our pain is shared; there are people all over the earth feeling just as we do right now. This simple gesture is a seed of compassion for self and other.
Training in equanimity is learning to open the door to all, welcoming all beings, inviting life to come visit.
professional warmth is easily mistaken for true compassion.
Staying with sorrow or pain is not necessarily an immediately gratifying process. But over time, we begin to feel lighter and more courageous.
mindfulness, an open-ended inquiry into our experience.
threefold purity—no big deal about the doer, no big deal about the action, no big deal about the result.
The Buddha’s principal message that day was that holding on to anything blocks wisdom. Any conclusions we might 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 prajnaparamita, patiently cutting through all our tendencies to hang on.
When someone pushes our buttons, do we set out to make the person wrong? Or do we repress our reaction with “I’m supposed to be loving. How could I hold this negative thought?” Our practice is to stay with the uneasiness and not solidify into a view.
