Quotes About Growth

the point is still to lean toward the discomfort of life and see it clearly rather than to protect ourselves from it.

In Buddha's opinion, to train in staying open and curious—to train in dissolving our assumptions and beliefs—is the best use of our human lives.

Letting there be room for not knowing is the most important thing of all.

The path is uncharted. It comes into existence moment by moment and at the same time drops away behind us. It's like riding on a train sitting backwards. We can't see where we're headed, only where we've been. This is a very encouraging teaching, because it says that the source of wisdom is whatever is going to happen to us today. The source of wisdom is whatever is happening to us right at this very instant.

And that can never be a mistake--to fly instead of staying in the nest with all the poop and everything that's in there.

I realized that it is these two things that staying with regrets offers: It can become the seed of compassion and empathy so that you can stand in the shoes of other people because you're feeling exactly what they feel. And it spurs you on to help people in the future rather than hurt them.

Learning how to be kind to ourselves, learning how to respect ourselves, is important. The reason it's important is that, fundamentally, when we look into our own hearts and begin to discover what is confused and what is brilliant, what is bitter and what is sweet, it isn't just ourselves that we're discovering. We're discovering the universe.

we can let the circumstances of our lives harden us so that we become increasingly resentful and afraid, or we can let them soften us and make us kinder and more open to what scares us.

Every challenge presents an opportunity for spiritual growth, whether it's a small irritation or when everything as you've known it falls apart.

the same old demons will always come up until finally you have learned your lesson, the lesson they came to teach you.

We can use our difficulties and problems to awaken our hearts.

Once I had an opportunity to talk with Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche, about the fact that I was not able to do my practice properly. I had just started the vajrayana practices and I was supposed to be visualizing. I couldn't visualize anything. I tried and tried but there was just nothing at all; I felt like a fraud doing the practice because it didn't feel natural to me. (...). So he encouraged me by saying that as long as you have these kinds of doubts, your practice will be good.

Like a treasure found at home, enriching me without fatigue, you, my dear troublemaker, are the means by which a confused person like me will attain enlightenment.

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.

if we understand how growth happens and are inspired to pursue the path of awakening, we develop an appetite for the things that challenge us. We become increasingly drawn to the places where learning and deepening can happen.

It's a continual process of opening and surrender, like taking off layer after layer of clothes

Meditation practice isn't about trying to throw ourselves away and become something better.

there's no end to the number of fresh starts you get. There's no fixed "you" doomed to stay in the same rut forever.

To be fearless isn't really to overcome fear, it's to come to know its nature.

If you acknowledge what's happening and refrain from acting, that opens up some space in your mind. Clinging to views and opinions, thinking you're always right and lording it over others, keeps you endlessly stuck.

Life's work is to wake up, to let the things that enter into the circle wake you up rather than put you to sleep. 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.

We can lead our life so as to become more awake to who we are and what we're doing rather than trying to improve or change or get rid of who we are or what we're doing.

The opposite of samsara is when the walls fall down, the cocoon completely disappears, and we are totally open to whatever may happen, with no withdrawing, no centralizing into ourselves. That is what we aspire to, the warrior's journey. That's what stirs us and inspires us: leaping, being thrown out of the nest, going through initiation rites, growing up, stepping into something that's uncertain and unknown.

May bodhichitta, precious and sublime, Arise where it has not yet come to be; And where it has arisen, may it never fail, But grow and flourish ever more and more.