Quotes About Openness

We will be softened by the sheer force of whatever energy arises—the energy of anger, the energy of disappointment, the energy of fear. When it's not solidified in one direction or another, that very energy pierces us to the heart, and it opens us. This is the discovery of egolessness.

If your everyday practice is to open to all your emotions, to all the people you meet, to all the situations you encounter, without closing down, trusting that you can do that — then that will take you as far as you can go. And then you'll understand all the teachings that anyone has ever taught.

How honest do we want to be with ourselves?

Be fully present. Feel your heart. And engage the next moment without an agenda.

being right on the spot nails us. It nails us right to the point of time and space that we are in. When we stop there and don't act out, don't repress, don't blame it on anyone else, and also don't blame it on ourselves, then we meet with an open-ended question that has no conceptual answer.

We don't like to have our basic assumptions challenged. It's too threatening.

A fundamentalist mind is a mind that has become rigid. First the heart closes, then the mind becomes hardened into a view, then you can justify your hatred of another human being because of what they represent and what they say and do.

Bodhichitta exists on two levels. First there is unconditional bodhichitta, an immediate experience that is refreshingly free of concept, opinion, and our usual all-caught-upness.

Second there is relative bodhichitta, our ability to keep our hearts and minds open to suffering without shutting down.

Chögyam Trungpa had an image for our tendency to obscure the openness of our being; he called it "putting makeup on space." We can aspire to experience the space without the makeup. Staying open and receptive for even a short time starts to interrupt our deep-seated resistance to feeling what we're feeling, to staying present where we are.

by acknowledging whatever arises without judgment, letting the thoughts simply dissolve, and then going back to the openness of this very moment.

instructions, in their simplest form, have three basic steps: Be fully present. Feel your heart. And engage the next moment without an agenda.

However, in this technique, because your eyes are open and because the gaze in not a tight gaze and because the whole emphasis of the practice is one of openess, even though you're mindful of the out-breath, you're not shutting out all other things that are going on.

The only way to do this is to open, be curious, and develop some sense of sympathy for everything that comes along, to get to know its nature and let it teach you what it will. It's going to stick around until you learn your lesson, at any rate.

Cultivating absolute bodhichitta means having a relationship with the world that is nonconceptual, that is unprejudiced, having a direct, unedited relationship with reality.

When we regard thoughts and emotions with humor and openness, that's how we perceive the universe.

When we practice discipline with flexibility, we become less moralistic and more tolerant.

The trick is to keep exploring and not bail out, even when we find out that something is not what we thought.

We don't experience the world fully unless we are willing to give everything away. Samaya means not holding anything back, not preparing our escape route, not looking for alternatives, not thinking that there is ample time to do things later.

We can learn to meet whatever arises with curiosity and not make it such a big deal.

Life is a good teacher and a good friend. Things are always in transition, if we could only realize it. Nothing ever sums itself up in the way that we like to dream about. The offcenter, in-between state is an ideal situation, a situation in which we don't get caught and we can open our hearts and minds beyond limit. It's a very tender, nonaggressive, openended state of affairs

Expansion never happens through greediness or pushing or striving. It happens through some combination of learning to relax where you already are and, at the same time, keeping the possibility open that your capacity, my capacity, the capacity of all beings, is limitless. As we continue to relax where we are, our opening expands.

If today the instruction is to put everything on the right, one does that as impeccably as one can. When tomorrow the instruction is to put everything on the left, one does that with one's whole heart. The idea of one right way sort of dissolves into the mist.

When we think that something is going to bring us pleasure, we don't know what's really going to happen. When we think something is going to give us misery, we don't know. Letting there be room for not knowing is the most important thing of all.