Meditation Saved My Life Quotes

“The real conquest of space is of the inner space that contains all worlds. Any other conquest, of a material nature, is an illusion.”
― Phakyab RINPOCHE, Meditation Saved My Life: A Tibetan Lama and the Healing Power of the Mind

“Birth, sickness, ageing and death flow on a river without ford or bridge; People of Tingri, have you prepared yourselves a boat? — PADAMPA SANGYE”
― Phakyab RINPOCHE, Meditation Saved My Life: A Tibetan Lama and the Healing Power of the Mind

“It is essential that the most destitute girl should be able to access higher education and be granted an equal status with men. ‘When a woman is educated, a people is educated,’ such is a saying of traditional wisdom.”
― Phakyab RINPOCHE, Meditation Saved My Life: A Tibetan Lama and the Healing Power of the Mind

“At the basis of my teachings, there is the opening of the heart, and I endeavor to introduce my students into the mind’s spacious states, which encompass the universes and all beings. Meditating on the opening of the heart concerns everyone, Buddhists as well as non-Buddhists, for it nurtures the fundamental human values of love, benevolence, compassion, forgiveness, human rights, and reconciliation. Without an opening of the heart, our ethics remain unembodied and can very well veer toward intolerance. Taking the path of the heart always helps us recognize the potential for kindness and transformation that is a feature of our humanity. If we have developed unconditional love, we will recognize this loving basis even in the cruelest among us, who act inhumanly because they ignore their true nature. Opening the heart makes us love beings so much that every day we renew our ever-keener longing to help them, so that they may find happiness and be delivered from suffering.”
― Phakyab RINPOCHE, Meditation Saved My Life: A Tibetan Lama and the Healing Power of the Mind

“I have three great missions in this life,” Rinpoche tells me, looking introspective. “First, as a human being. Second, as a teacher of Dharma. Third, as a lama, holder of a lineage. As a human being, at the age of thirteen, I offered my life to the service of all beings. In my experience of the world, I have therefore adopted an open-minded, trustful, and spontaneously welcoming attitude toward all those who cross my path through maturation of karma. Nobody I meet is foreign to me. In each one, I find my brothers and sisters in humanity. As human beings, we all have within us the jewel of awakened mind, which is our extraordinary potential for kindness and inner transformation.”
― Phakyab RINPOCHE, Meditation Saved My Life: A Tibetan Lama and the Healing Power of the Mind

“I have vowed to heal in the name of all beings. This vow is being fulfilled, Sofia, with the testimony of this book. I have shared this life experience with you in order to help my readers better recognize the power of their own mind.”
― Phakyab RINPOCHE, Meditation Saved My Life: A Tibetan Lama and the Healing Power of the Mind

“A grain of rice is the result of an uninterrupted cosmic process of germination and maturation, unifying the sky, the earth, the elements, and human action, following the rhythm of seasons, which is determined by the revolutions of our planet, the moon, and the sun. A grain of rice makes up a whole, an unfinished, perpetually transforming entity.”
― Phakyab RINPOCHE, Meditation Saved My Life: A Tibetan Lama and the Healing Power of the Mind

“Three months of prison and torture! It’s a terrible ordeal! But for others, it lasts ten years, twenty years! It kills some!” I understood then how important it is to put our sufferings into perspective, to not lock oneself in a painful past that indefinitely extends the ordeal. When”
― Phakyab RINPOCHE, Meditation Saved My Life: A Tibetan Lama and the Healing Power of the Mind

“Americans enjoy the respect of human rights in their country so much that they do not always understand how precious these rights are and how much they have to be defended.”
― Phakyab RINPOCHE, Meditation Saved My Life: A Tibetan Lama and the Healing Power of the Mind