Quotes About Growth

We never know if we're going to fall flat or sit up tall. When there's a big disappointment, we don't know if that's the end of the story. It may be just the beginning of a great adventure.

We work on ourselves in order to help others, but also we help others in order to work on ourselves.

We may doubt that we're up to being a warrior-in-training. But we can ask ourselves this question: "Do I prefer to grow up and relate to life directly, or do I choose to live and die in fear?

When you come from the view that you're fundamentally good rather than fundamentally flawed, as you see yourself speak or act out, as you see yourself repress, you will have a growing understanding that you're not a bad person who needs to shape up but a good person with temporary, malleable habits that are causing you a lot of suffering. And then, in that spirit, you can become very familiar with these temporary but strongly embedded habits.

We try to do what we think is going to help. But we don't know. We never know if we're going to fall flat or sit up tall. When there's a big disappointment, we don't know if that's the end of the story. It may be just the beginning of a great adventure.

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. It's going to stick around until you learn your lesson, at any rate.

If we make the journey to get security, we're completely missing the point.

To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-man's-land, to experience each moment as completely new and fresh.

It's painful to face how we harm others, and it takes a while. It's a journey that happens because of our commitment to gentleness and honesty, our commitment to staying awake, to being mindful.

getting to know fear, becoming familiar with fear, looking it right in the eye—not as a way to solve problems, but as a complete undoing of old ways of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and thinking.

If you are interested in these teachings, then you have to accept the fact that you're never going to get it all together." It was a shocking statement to me. He said with a lot of clarity, "You are never going to get it all together, you're never going to get your act together, fully, completely. You're never going to get all the little loose ends tied up.

Rather than trying to get rid of something or buying into a dualistic sense of being attacked, we take the opportunity to see how we close down when we're squeezed.

Todos nosotros somos en ocasiones un caso perdido.

the Goal WHAT DOES IT TAKE to use the life we already have in order to make us wiser rather than more stuck? What is the source of wisdom at a personal, individual level? The answer to these questions seems to have to do with bringing everything that we encounter to the path. Everything

lo que quiere decir es que lo que normalmente consideramos obstáculos no son verdaderamente nuestros enemigos, sino nuestros amigos.

Podemos toparnos con un perro de lanas o con un furioso perro guardián, pero lo interesante es: ¿qué ocurre a continuación?

If we begin to get in touch with whatever we feel with some kind of kindness, our protective shells will melt, and we'll find that more areas of our lives are workable. As we learn to have compassion for ourselves, the circle of compassion for others—what and whom we can work with, and how—becomes wider.

When we practice discipline with flexibility, we become less moralistic and more tolerant.

Chaos should be regarded as extremely good news.

The trick is to keep exploring and not bail out, even when we find out that something is not what we thought.

A warrior begins to take responsibility for the direction of her life. It's as if we are lugging around unnecessary baggage. Our training encourages us to open the bags and look closely at what we are carrying. In doing this we begin to understand that much of it isn't needed anymore.

We acknowledge our aversions and our cravings. We become familiar with the strategies and beliefs we use to fortify our cocoon.

Yesterday I talked about cultivating precision, gentleness, and openess, and described how the meditation technique helps us to remember the qualities that we already possess.

Expansion never happens through greediness or pushing or striving. It happens through some combination of learning to relax where you already are and, at the same time, keeping the possibility open that your capacity, my capacity, the capacity of all beings, is limitless. As we continue to relax where we are, our opening expands.