Quotes About Acceptance

Everyone makes mistakes and everyone deserves a second chance.

You can't make anyone love you. You just have to reveal who you are and take your chances. (105)

I want the world to know that everybody deserves a second chance.

I don't think people were betting on me, but they were giving me a chance. I think I rode a wave there, by being different in appearance than the girls who preceded me.

You are you, and I am I, and if by chance we find each other, it's beautiful. If not, it can't be helped.

There isn't any hell or heaven except for how we relate to our world. Hell is just resistance to life.

getting the knack of relaxing in the midst of chaos, learning not to panic—this is the spiritual path.

Although it is embarassing and painful, it is very healing to stop hiding from yourself. It is healing to know all the ways that you're sneaky, all the ways hat you hide out, all the ways that you shut down, deny, close off, criticize people, all your weird little ways.

But the advice we usually get is to sweeten it up, smooth it over, take a pill, or distract ourselves, but by all means make it go away. We don't need that kind of encouragement, because dissociating from fear is what we do naturally. We habitually spin off and freak out when there's even the merest hint of fear. We feel it coming and we check out.

None of what we've learned seems very relevant when our lover leaves us, when our child has a tantrum in the supermarket, when we're insulted by our colleague.

The first noble truth of the Buddha is that when we feel suffering, it doesn't mean that something is wrong. What a relief. Finally somebody told the truth. Suffering is part of life, and we don't have to feel it's happening because we personally made the wrong move. In reality, however, when we feel suffering, we think that something is wrong. As long

I remember very clearly, at a time of enormous stress in my life, reading Alice in Wonderland. Alice became a heroine for me because she fell into this hole and she just free-fell. She didn't grab for the edges, she wasn't terrified, trying to stop her fall; she just fell and she looked at things as she went down. Then, when she landed, she was in a new place. She didn't take refuge in anything.

The problem is that the desire to change is fundamentally a form of aggression toward yourself.

Thich Nhat Hanh says, "It's not impermanence that makes us suffer. What makes us suffer is wanting things to be permanent when they are not.

A question that has intrigued me for years is this: how can we start exactly where we are, with all our entanglements, and still develop unconditional acceptance

We can explore the nature of that piece of shit. We can know the nature of dislike, shame, and embarrassment and not believe there's something wrong with that. We can drop the fundamental hope that there is a better "me" who one day will emerge. We can't just jump over ourselves as if we were not there. It's better to take a straight look at all our hopes and fears.

My experience is that by practicing without shoulds, we gradually discover our wakefulness and our confidence. Gradually, without any agenda except to be honest and kind, we assume responsibility for being here in this unpredictable world, in this unique moment, in this precious human body.

Fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to the truth. If we commit ourselves to staying right where we are, then our experience becomes very vivid. Things become very clear when there is nowhere to escape.

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.

When we become aware that we are thinking, we say to ourselves, "thinking," with an unbiased attitude and with tremendous gentleness. Then we return our focus to the breath. We regard the thoughts as bubbles and the labeling like touching them with a feather. There's just this light touch—"thinking"—and they dissolve back into the space.

The truth is that when we really begin to do this, we're going to be continually humbled. There's not going to be much room for the arrogance that holding on to ideals can bring. The arrogance that inevitably does arise is going to be continually shot down by our own courage to step forward a little further.

Meditation is about seeing clearly the body that we have, the mind that we have, the domestic situation that we have, the job that we have, and the people who are in our lives.

This very moment is the perfect teacher.

But the truth is that we can never avoid uncertainty. This not knowing is part of the adventure, and it's also what makes us afraid. Bodhichitta