Quotes About Growth

Remembering impermanence motivates you to go back and look at the teachings, to see what they tell you about how to work with your life, how to rouse yourself, how to cheer up, how to work with emotions.

Compassion involves learning to relax and allow ourselves to move gently toward what scares us.

What I have realized through practicing is that practice isn't about beng the best horse or the good horse or the poor horse or the worst horse.

Self-improvement can have temporary results, but lasting transformation occurs only when we honor ourselves as the source of wisdom and compassion.

Fear can make you start asking a lot of questions. If it doesn't get you down, it's going to start you wondering, "What's this fear? Where did it come from? What am I scared of?" Maybe you're scared of the most exciting things you have yet to learn. Impermanence is a great reminder.

El miedo es una reacción natural al acercarse a la verdad.

you begin where you are, you see what a child you are, and you don't criticize that.

The more we connect with a bigger perspective, the more we connect with energetic joy. Exertion is touching in to our appetite for enlightenment. It allows us to act, to give, to work appreciatively with whatever comes our way.

Taking the leap involves making a commitment to ourselves and to the earth itself—making a commitment to let go of old grudges, to not avoid people and situations and emotions that make us feel uneasy, to not cling to our fears

Only with equanimity can we see that everything that comes into our circle has come to teach us what we need to know.

We don't have to be harsh with ourselves when we think, sitting here, that our meditation or our oryoki or the way we are in the world is in the category of worst horse.

strengthening habitual patterns of suffering. We begin to see this more and more clearly, and we begin to realize that we can do something different.

When you refrain from habitual thoughts and behavior, the uncomfortable feelings will still be there. They don't magically disappear. Over the years, I've come to call resting with the discomfort "the detox period," because when you don't act on your habitual reactions, it's like giving up an addiction. You're left with the feelings you were trying to escape. The practice is to make a wholehearted relationship with that.

When something hurts in life, we don't usually think of it as our path or as the source of wisdom. In fact, we think that the reason we're on the path is to get rid of this painful feeling.

An analogy for bodhichitta is the rawness of a broken heart. Sometimes this broken heart gives birth to anxiety and panic, sometimes to anger, resentment, and blame.

In reality, when you feel depressed, lonely, betrayed, or any unwanted feelings, this is an important moment on the spiritual path. This is when real transformation can take place.

Rudolph Bahro. He writes, "When an old culture is dying, the new culture is created by those people who are not afraid to be insecure.

This was a little house, with a ceiling that kept getting higher and higher, a hot place with no windows. This was anger.

I didn't enjoy working with Bill [Murray]. We fought a lot... but I've let go of some of the anger and we seem to get along fine now.

Every present anger derives from past weakness.

Anger is a rough water; if you can canalize it into a water mill, you can benefit from it. Anything bad can be transformed into good.

We all grow up with anger. It's part of the human condition. But what do you do with that? It seems obvious to me that you've got to use it for something, but you have to separate it from your ego.

we wish to make rage into a fire that cooks things rather than a fire of conflagration.

Growth chestnuts have to be placed on the unyielding anvil of biophysical realities and then crushed with the hammer of moral argument.