The Road Home Quotes

“I often find that when I fall into the trap of speaking too harshly, it is because I don’t have enough confidence in the power of my own voice to carry sufficient strength on its own. When you realize that your speech can be powerful, you don’t need to amplify that power by making personal attacks that overgeneralize the specific feedback you are trying to give.”
― Ethan Nichtern, The Road Home: A Contemporary Exploration of the Buddhist Path

“Here’s my personal definition of a Buddhist: someone who prioritizes cultivating her relationship to her own heartmind—and her relationship to other sentient beings—above whatever else she might achieve in life.”
― Ethan Nichtern, The Road Home: A Contemporary Exploration of the Buddhist Path

“Whenever an emotion arises in the space of our awareness, it creates a powerful wind that can be either harnessed as wisdom or fixated upon and treated neurotically and destructively.”
― Ethan Nichtern, The Road Home: A Contemporary Exploration of the Buddhist Path

“When we spend lifetimes numbing out against now, even the gentle stillness of the present moment becomes a threat. Even slowing down long enough to look at your own heartmind becomes an act of revolution against the sheer pace of our social karma.”
― Ethan Nichtern, The Road Home: A Contemporary Exploration of the Buddhist Path

“Apathy is the rusted armor worn by a scared human being.”
― Ethan Nichtern, The Road Home: A Contemporary Exploration of the Buddhist Path

“The basic premise of Buddhism is that there is no savior to worship: nobody is going to save you from your own mind. Nobody can get into the heart of your experience and fix anything for you. If you want to make your own internal experience more hospitable, only you can do that work. Others can always support and guide you and spark insights, but ultimately you are your own boss and the agent of understanding your mind and opening your heart. Nothing”
― Ethan Nichtern, The Road Home: A Contemporary Exploration of the Buddhist Path

“Projecting our needs onto somebody else’s disagreement is very manipulative and makes it impossible for the parties involved to come to an understanding of what they want and need for themselves. It may also lead us to draw false equivalences between people’s behavior, where we just assume that both sides have equal truth because we are unwilling to accept that there might be very valid grievances at play, and that the people involved might never agree to a solution. What we should be saying instead is, “What do you really want here? Do you want to work this out, or do you want to go your separate ways?”
― Ethan Nichtern, The Road Home: A Contemporary Exploration of the Buddhist Path

“In most cases, the truth is a blade that does not need to be sharpened, and we almost never need to twist the knife. Because as a listener we can empathize with the fear that what we hear might hurt, we can also work to apply gentleness when speaking. I”
― Ethan Nichtern, The Road Home: A Contemporary Exploration of the Buddhist Path

“Our mind is conditioned by the past, and to try to alter what we are feeling right now, especially in the name of being a compassionate spiritual person, is just wishful thinking. This is a crucial realization, because we spend so much of life, and, sadly, so much of our spiritual paths, wishing we were feeling something other than what we are actually feeling in the present moment.”
― Ethan Nichtern, The Road Home: A Contemporary Exploration of the Buddhist Path

“The view that human beings are inherently flawed, confused, and aggressive has proliferated throughout human history, across cultures, religions, and countless fields of “secular” inquiry. This view, which Pema Chödrön calls the view of “Basic Badness,” has consequently had a huge “invisible hand” in shaping a wide range of systems within which we all live, especially the system of our own heart and mind. There’s no way to avoid the following point: the Shambhala and Buddhist teachings stand in direct and total opposition to a view that human beings are originally sinful and fundamentally flawed. The Shambhala teachings say that human beings, all human beings, are basically good and endowed with inherent wisdom (Buddha nature). Here, “good” does not mean “better than.” Good does not stand in relation to “bad,” because there is no bad when it comes to human nature. Without comparison, “good” here means whole, pure, and totally worthy of existing.”
― Ethan Nichtern, The Road Home: A Contemporary Exploration of the Buddhist Path

“Our personal journey is rarely easy, and our global journey is even less so. Because everything is interdependent, we have to work on both of these levels at once. Trying to change society without deeply understanding our heartmind won’t work. Your own road home can never be separated from society’s journey. We need a unifying theory and language that allow us to link the lessons of our personal journey with the situation facing our world. The important question then, a question laced with a gorgeous irony, is, “How do we get home from here?” Or, maybe more appropriate, “How do we get here from here?”
― Ethan Nichtern, The Road Home: A Contemporary Exploration of the Buddhist Path

“If you are preparing for an important meeting or event, for instance, you often fantasize about everything that could possibly go wrong beforehand. This is basically just an anxious mind generating a negative, insecure, and incapable image of itself. With visualization, the very space of our imagination, often dominated by fantasies of the future and nightmares of the past, could be converted into a kind of mindfully creative space, a kind of movie studio that actually benefits sentient beings.”
― Ethan Nichtern, The Road Home: A Contemporary Exploration of the Buddhist Path

“Visualization is not just some spiritual event—it’s a basic cognitive process.”
― Ethan Nichtern, The Road Home: A Contemporary Exploration of the Buddhist Path

“With natural curiosity, the practice of mindfulness becomes effortless.”
― Ethan Nichtern, The Road Home: A Contemporary Exploration of the Buddhist Path

“As we’ve said, those people weren’t “born this way” (if they were, what use would they be as examples for us?). Rather, they were brave enough and patient enough to slowly develop themselves, to till the fertile soil of their own minds over time.”
― Ethan Nichtern, The Road Home: A Contemporary Exploration of the Buddhist Path

“The point of dharma practice is not to try to live without any narrative. The point is to see how all narratives have a holographic nature. Because”
― Ethan Nichtern, The Road Home: A Contemporary Exploration of the Buddhist Path

“the lazy assumption that greed—which is demonstrably harmful to the individual who gets caught up in it—is somehow beneficial when replicated across our social institutions does not stand the test of any contemplative analysis of how lasting happiness is actually achieved.”
― Ethan Nichtern, The Road Home: A Contemporary Exploration of the Buddhist Path

“It is a mark of great spiritual laziness to take the world we inherit as a given. It is constantly in flux, and it is our own projective mind that creates it. A true visionary sees society itself as a shared projection, a kind of hologram we are all cocreating with no permanent basis, one that can always be reimagined based on the shifting views of human nature that we hold.”
― Ethan Nichtern, The Road Home: A Contemporary Exploration of the Buddhist Path

“Unless we get at the institutional structures that mold our personal and interpersonal experience, our understanding will be incomplete. If our practice is going to truly help the world, it must evolve beyond personal awareness and service work into a true sense of participation in society, of questioning the decisions that we have made together about how our society should be arranged. This”
― Ethan Nichtern, The Road Home: A Contemporary Exploration of the Buddhist Path

“sacredness refers to the holistic view that our spiritual self and our worldly existence can never be isolated from each other. Thus, whatever divinity is available to human beings, whatever our highest values might be, the only place we can witness that divinity directly is within our life in society.”
― Ethan Nichtern, The Road Home: A Contemporary Exploration of the Buddhist Path

“When we are mindful, we experience our social presence as a series of momentary connections with one other being. These moments of interpersonal connection are like the Lego building blocks of our social awareness. The”
― Ethan Nichtern, The Road Home: A Contemporary Exploration of the Buddhist Path

“when an ancient text describes “worldly concerns,” it is very important to understand that this is actually a geographic designation, not an existential one. The “world” really just encompassed the frenetic endeavors of life in the city, that place of hustle and bustle, lust and heartache, career and ambition, art and entertainment, government and politics. Deeply pursuing spiritual practice meant leaving the city behind.”
― Ethan Nichtern, The Road Home: A Contemporary Exploration of the Buddhist Path

“Inhabiting a human nervous system is kind of like living in a house where the doorbell and the burglar alarm make exactly the same sound. Because”
― Ethan Nichtern, The Road Home: A Contemporary Exploration of the Buddhist Path

“When our goals become comparative, we end up with the constant paranoia of an existence of always being weighed on hidden scales, living with the stress of keeping our elbows out in anticipation of others trying to get ahead of us. All of this is a distortion of the wisdom of achievement, which lies hidden within the emotional energy of jealousy and envy.”
― Ethan Nichtern, The Road Home: A Contemporary Exploration of the Buddhist Path

“As a foundational principle, all Buddhist practices are based on clear perception, using the naked and direct honesty of mindfulness practice as a basis to create a bare attention and direct experience of the present reality. At the same time, if Vajrayana is about ritualizing every aspect of our consciousness in the service of awakening, then paying attention to the way things really are includes making use of the mind’s imaginative capacity. The point of self-awareness is not to turn off our projector, per se, but to study the projector, to realize that the projector is always on, and to notice that our experiences are projections that arise in the theater of the heartmind. The”
― Ethan Nichtern, The Road Home: A Contemporary Exploration of the Buddhist Path

“in order to fully awaken, we have to dissolve the false dichotomy between secular and spiritual truths, and start to view ourselves, each other, and the world we share as sacred, 24/7/365.”
― Ethan Nichtern, The Road Home: A Contemporary Exploration of the Buddhist Path

“As Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche puts it, you can tell what the most important building is within a society by which is the tallest. Within ancient Europe, cathedrals often reached the most soaring heights, as did mosques in the ancient Middle East. Now, in our Western metropolises, we all bow before cathedrals of financial commerce. Our sacred values are implied by our ritualistic choices, whether we agree to them or not. We”
― Ethan Nichtern, The Road Home: A Contemporary Exploration of the Buddhist Path

“When we separate our spiritual self from our life in the world, we create a kind of inner schism that leads to a sense of meaninglessness and isolation in our “secular” life.”
― Ethan Nichtern, The Road Home: A Contemporary Exploration of the Buddhist Path

“the historical Buddha was consistently offering a series of psychological and ethical tools for working with the very human realities of dissatisfaction and confusion. His emphasis on understanding and alleviating human suffering was the very first thesis of his work, a central thesis from which he never deviated. Time and again, he presented modes of humanistic training designed to alleviate the dissatisfaction caused by grasping, rejecting, and numbing out, which are the nasty symptoms of our commuter’s mentality. At”
― Ethan Nichtern, The Road Home: A Contemporary Exploration of the Buddhist Path

“There are many people who are more learned than I and more elevated in their wisdom. However, I have never made a separation between the spiritual and the worldly. If you understand the ultimate aspect of the dharma, this is the ultimate aspect of the world. And if you should cultivate the ultimate aspect of the world, this should be in harmony with the dharma. —CHOGYAM TRUNGPA RINPOCHE”
― Ethan Nichtern, The Road Home: A Contemporary Exploration of the Buddhist Path