Quotes About Acceptance

The minute we have even a passing thought of judging another person, the red light of practice should go on.

At any given moment, we are the way we are, and we see what we're able to see.

So there are two kinds of suffering. One is when we feel we're being pressed down; as though suffering is coming at us from without, as though we're receiving something that's making us suffer. The other kind of suffering is being under, just bearing it, just being it.

Who knows how you should be? We simply do our best, over and over and over.

In practice, we work with the complex of physical sensation and thought that is "I feel hurt." If we totally experience the sensations and thought, then the "feeling hurt" evaporates. I never would say that we shouldn't feel what we feel.

When we discover Zen practice, we may hold out a hope that it is going to solve our problems and make our life perfect. But Zen practice simply returns us to life as it is. Being our lives more and more is what Zen practice is about. Our lives are simply what they are, and Zen helps us to recognize that fact. The thought If I do this practice patiently enough, everything will be different is simply another belief system, another version of the promise that is never kept.

Circumstances are seldom right. You never have the capacities, the strength, the wisdom, the virtue you ought to have. You must always do with less than you need in a situation vastly different from what you would have chosen.

Next to fat babies, midgets are my favorite things to hold. I love them so much, and I want to help them to do adult things like drive cars, Jet-Ski, and lip-synch. I'm in awe of their little limbs, their large craniums, and their medicine-ball asses. I love the little baby steps they take while shifting their weight from side to side, and the fact that when you knock one over accidentally, he flails like a turtle on its back that can't get up right away.

Everything with me had always been black and white. Life or death. I wanted more gray. I wanted to learn how to forgive.

The great thing about rejection is that it doesn't matter how many times you get rejected. All that needs to happen is if for one person to tell you 'yes' and then everybody else can go f*** themselves.

Judging other people had become my way of avoiding judgment of myself, and I had to do better than that.

I define me. No event or person does this. I define me. I decide who I am and how I'm going to behave, and I choose to be better. To look more carefully, to trudge deeper. To think about other people's past and not judge someone for doing or handling something differently than I would. To understand my limitations, my shortcomings - that is my growth edge.

I had a therapist once tell me to "sit with my shit," and I believe that to be a necessary evil of being constantly disappointed.

I didn't know that my brother's death was defining me. I didn't know that I had the ability to say no to being defined by death. Now I was with a person who could help me process what happened and turn the parts of me that acted like a nine-year-old into a self-actualized adult who had come to a better understanding of what it means to dig deep and admit your pain - thereby beginning the process of relinquishing it.

Sometimes, Chelsea, I wonder, how you get by from day to day. It's a good thing you're so voluptuous.

That's what death is like, though. You can't only cry for two weeks straight. You cry, and then you get tired of crying, and then someone says something, and then you're all laughing, and it feels bad to be laughing, but it also feels so good. Without the laughter, we'd all be dying too.

Why are babies allowed to cry when they wake up, but adults crying when they wake is frowned upon? Babies are permitted to act like assholes whenever they feel like it and no one blinks...

He was the only person in my family who understood that I was born going through menopause, and that whenever I ate soup, I had to take my top off.

She told me that she liked white people but didn't have any close white friends and asked if I was interested in cross-pollinating. I told her we would see how things went but not to put the chicken wing before the egg. We grew to be fast friends, and a couple

She worried about Shana and Roy. She always told me she never worried about me. She never held any of my past behavior against me; she never passed judgment—she was always ready with new unconditional love.

A.J. was one of the guys. One of the guys with breasts, a shapely butt, and sparkling green eyes.

The woman who looks back at me from my bathroom mirror is sliding toward her mid-fifties. She'd better be careful- she's getting old. I myself am about thirty. I've been thirty for about twenty-three years now.

People live, and then they die, and as long as they do both things propertly, there's nothing much to regret.

When Suffering knocks at your door and you say there is no seat left for him, he tells you not to worry because he has brought his own stool.