Quotes About Growth

Everything in your life - every moment, every struggle - is the path. Everything is an opportunity for awakening.

May bodhichitta, precious and sublime, Arise where it has not yet come to be; And where it has arisen may it not decline, But grow and flourish ever more and more. The

even in the most difficult situations, we do our best to smile at fear, to smile at our righteous indignation, our cowardliness, our avoidance of vulnerability.

Meditation helps you to meet your edge; it's where you actually come up against it and you start to lose it.

Chaos should be regarded as extremely good news. —CHÖGYAM TRUNGPA RINPOCHE

Live your life as an experiment. Adopt an attitude of "I'm not sure what will help in this situation, but I'm going to experiment and try this." Sometimes the result will be, "Wow, did that ever not work!" But if it is, we've learned something. And now we can try something else.

Sooner or later we understand that although we can't make fear look pretty, it will nevertheless introduce us to all the teaching we've ever heard or read.

But there is that feeling. And there's always another challenge, and that keeps us humble. Life knocks you off your pedestal.

The path of meditation isn't always a linear path. It's not like you begin to open, and you open more and more and you settle more and more, and then all of a sudden the confining box is gone forever. There are setbacks. Change happens, even in our practice. This is a fundamental truth. Everything is always changing because it's alive and dynamic.

Meditation is a process of transformation, instead of a process of becoming more and more set in our ways. And, as you know, as we get older it's very common to become increasingly fixed in our habits. But then you do meet people who, for some reason, are becoming more and more flexible and open as they age. Which kind of person do you want to be?

They were tested and failed and still kept exploring how to just stay there, not seeking solid ground.

When we practice generating compassion, we can expect to experience our fear of pain. Compassion practice is daring.

Eventually it dawns on us that we can regret causing harm without becoming weighed down by negative shame. Just seeing the hurt and heartbreak clearly motivates us to move on. By acknowledging what we did, cleanly and compassionately, we go forward.

At the beginning joy is just a feeling that our own situation is workable. We stop looking for a more suitable place to be. We've discovered that the continual search for something better does not work out. This doesn't mean that there are suddenly flowers growing where before there were only rocks. It means we have confidence that something will grow here.

The most helpful alternative is to look objectively at what is happening and try to learn something from it, something that will enable us to see clearly how to proceed. This way of working with our propensities in our daily life will definitely pay off when we die. Before death, when actually dying, and beyond that, people predictably experience a wide range of strong emotions, and how we relate to them is important.

What seems undesirable in our lives doesn't have to put us to sleep. What seems undesirable in our lives doesn't have to trigger habitual reactions. We can let it show us where we're at and let it remind us that the teachings encourage precision and gentleness, with loving-kindness toward every moment.

We are given chances all the time. We can either cling to security, or we can let ourselves feel exposed, as if we had just been born, as if we had just popped out into the brightness of life and were completely naked.

AS A SPECIES, we should never underestimate our low tolerance for discomfort.

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. The off-center, in-between state is an ideal situation, a situation in which we don't get caught and we can open our hearts and minds beyond limit. It's a very tender, nonaggressive, open-ended state of affairs.

Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don't really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It's just like that.

Those events and people in our lives who trigger our unresolved issues could be regarded as good news. We don't have to go hunting for anything. We don't need to try to create situations in which we reach our limit. They occur all by themselves, with clockwork regularity.

If we always stay in that narrow zone, how are we going to grow?

Each day, we're given many opportunities to open up or shut down. The most precious opportunity presents itself when we come to the place where we think we can't handle whatever is happening.

Things like disappointment and anxiety are messengers telling us that we're about to go into unknown territory.