Quotes About Experience

We are not striving to make pain go away or to become a better person. In fact, we are giving up control altogether and letting concepts and ideals fall apart. This starts with realizing that whatever occurs is neither the beginning nor the end. It is just the same kind of normal human experience that's been happening to everyday people from the beginning of time.

the life span of any particular emotion is only one and a half minutes. After that we have to revive the emotion and get it going again.

Our neurosis and our wisdom are made out of the same material.

Shielding ourselves from the vulnerability of all living beings—which includes our own vulnerability—cuts us off from the full experience of life. Our

To live is to be willing to die over and over again. From the awakened point of view, that's life. Death is wanting to hold on to what you have and to have every experience confirm you and congratulate you and make you feel completely together.

We all have tremendous potential and yet we stay closed in a very small, fearful world, based on wanting to avoid the unpleasant, the painful, the insecure, the unpredictable. There is vast, limitless richness and wonder we could experience if we fully accustomed our nervous systems to the open-ended, uncertain reality of how things are.

When we stop seeking the familiarity of samsara, when we stop fighting the groundlessness of freedom from imputed meaning, emptiness becomes an experience of awe, of the infinite, of limitless pace.

The message here is that the only way to ease our pain is to experience it fully. Learn to stay. Learn to stay with uneasiness, learn to stay with the tightening, learn to stay with the itch and urge of shenpa, so that the habitual chain reaction doesn't continue to rule our lives, and the patterns that we consider unhelpful don't keep getting stronger as the days and months and years go by.

I feel gratitude to the Buddha for pointing out that what we struggle against all our lives can be acknowledged as ordinary experience. Life does continually go up and down. People and situations are unpredictable and so is everything else. Everybody knows the pain of getting what we don't want: saints, sinners, winners, losers. I feel gratitude that someone saw the truth and pointed out that we don't suffer this kind of pain because of our personal inability to get things right.

a psychotic person is drowning in the very same things that a mystic swims in.

The journey of patience involves relaxing, opening to what's happening, experiencing a sense of wonder.

Our story lines are different, but when it comes to pain and pleasure and our reaction to them, people everywhere are the same.

How do we work with our minds when we meet our match? Rather than indulge or reject our experience, we can somehow let the energy of the emotion, the quality of what we're feeling, pierce us to the heart. This is easier said than done, but it's a noble way to live. It's definitely the path of compassion—the path of cultivating human bravery and kindheartedness.

Any experience can be made into a further blockage or can become a way of freeing ourselves.

If we can train ourselves through meditation to be more open and more accepting toward the wild arc of our experience ... we can become more settled and relaxed amid whatever life brings us.

It's not a terrible thing that we feel fear when faced with the unknown. It is part of being alive, something we all share.

In fact, anyone who stands on the edge of the unknown, fully in the present without reference point, experiences groundlessness. That's when our understanding goes deeper, when we find that the present moment is a pretty vulnerable place and that this can be completely unnerving and completely tender at the same time.

All of us derive security and comfort from the imaginary world of memories and fantasies and plans. We really don't want to stay with the nakedness of our present experience

Holding on to beliefs limits our experience of life. That doesn't mean that beliefs or ideas or thinking is a problem; the stubborn attitude of having to have things be a particular way, grasping on to our beliefs and thoughts, all these cause the problems.

feel gratitude to the Buddha for pointing out that what we struggle against all our lives can be acknowledged as ordinary experience. Life does continually go up and down.

Trungpa Rinpoche once said that the dharma has to be experienced because when the real quality of our lives, including the obstacles and problems and experiences that cause us to start questioning, becomes intense, any mere philosophical belief isn't going to hold a candle to the reality of what we are experiencing.

According to these teachings, what we experience in the present is the result of the seeds we ve sown for hundreds of years, over the course of many lifetimes.

If anger were mileage, I'd be a very frequent flyer, right up there in First Class.

Age looks with anger on the temerity of youth, and youth with contempt on the scrupulosity of age.