Quotes About Understanding

Even when we do our very best to treat those close to us with utmost respect and understanding, conflict happens. That's life. That's human nature.

We can understand the inherent radiance & purity of our minds by understanding metta. Like the mind, metta is not distorted by what it encounters.

Trying to impose our personal agenda on someone else's experience is the shadow side of love, while real love recognizes that life unfolds at its own pace.

The key to cultivating confidence in ourselves is understanding our right to make the truth our own.

It is awareness of both our shared pain and our longing for happiness that links us to other people and helps us to turn toward them with compassion.

With mindfulness, loving kindness, and self-compassion, we can begin to let go of our expectations about how life and those we love should be.

Mindfulness won't ensure you'll win an argument with your sister. Mindfulness won't enable you to bypass your feelings of anger or hurt either. But it may help you see the conflict in a new way, one that allows you to break through old patterns.

To celebrate someone else's life, we need to find a way to look at it straight on, not from above with judgment or from below with envy.

Respecting differences while gaining insight into our essential connected-ness, we can free ourselves from the impulse to rigidly categorize the world in terms of narrow boundaries and labels.

In a situation of potential conflict, let compassion guide you.

Not everyone wants to take up meditation, but most people can feel an alignment with values like mutual respect, insightful investigation, listening to one another. Meditation is a way to help those values become real in day-to-day life, helping people to understand themselves more and more and have a way to not get lost in old patterns.

Can we allow the lives of others to be different from ours and feel happy for them? Can we rejoice for them as their happiness grows, in whatever way that is happening?

We cannot instantaneously force ourselves to forgive—and forgiveness happens at a different pace for everyone and is dependent on the particulars of any given situation.

Equanimity's strength derives from a combination of understanding and trust. It is based on understanding that the conflict and frustration we feel when we can't control the world doesn't come from our inability to do so but rather from the fact that we are trying to control the uncontrollable.

Hatred does not help us alleviate our pain even in the slightest.

Can you imagine a mind state in which there is no bitter, condemning judgement of oneself or of others? This mind does not see the world in terms of good and bad,might and wrong, good and evil; it sees only 'suffering and the end of suffering.

Compassion is born out of lovingkindness. It is born of knowing our oneness, not just thinking about it or wishing it were so. It is born out of the wisdom of seeing things exactly as they are.

The simple act of being completely present to another person is truly an act of love—no drama is required.

There may be people who absolutely defy our ability (or willingness) to think of even one good thing about them. In that case, focus on the universal wish to be happy, which this difficult person also shares. All beings want to be happy, yet so very few know how. It is out of ignorance that any of us cause suffering, for ourselves or for others.

To forgive, we may need to open our minds to a fuller exploration of the context in which the events occurred, and feel compassion for the circumstances and everyone involved, starting with ourselves.

In reality, love is fluid; it's a verb, not a noun.

Telling the story, acknowledging what has happened and how you feel, is often a necessary part of forgiveness.

That is why we do not hold an understanding of karma in a narrow way.  It is an extremely vast vision of life.  If at a given moment we experience the fruits of a past action, whether wholesome or unwholesome, our experience is the experience of all beings.  If we see an experience happening outside ourselves, we understand that this also is our experience,as in a dream when every character is some reflection of our own mind.

The simple act of being completely present to another person is truly an act of love