Quotes About Growth

What does this story mean? My understanding of it is that what we habitually regard as obstacles are not really our enemies, but rather our friends. What we call obstacles are really the way the world and our entire experience teach us where we're stuck.

It's a gradual awakening, and it's cumulative, but that's actually what happens. We don't sit in meditation to become good meditators. We sit in meditation so that we'll be more awake in our lives.

Looking at the arrows and swords, and how we react to them, we can always return to basic wisdom mind. 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. This is how we open our hearts. It is how we awaken our intelligence and connect with fundamental buddha nature.

In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few." At

we are all a paradoxical bundle of rich potential that consists of both neurosis and wisdom.

we ourselves can sort out what to accept and what to reject. We can discern what will make us complete, sane, grown-up people, and what—if we are too involved in it—will keep us children forever. This is the process of making friends with ourselves and with our world. It involves not just the parts we like, but the whole picture, because it all has a lot to teach us.

The central question of a warrior's training is not how we avoid uncertainty and fear but how we relate to discomfort.

imperfections into a nice smooth ride. 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. To live is to be willing to die over and over again. From the awakened point of view, that's life. Death is wanting to hold on to what you have and to have every experience confirm you and congratulate you and make you feel completely together.

The kinds of discoveries that are made through practice have nothing to do with believing in anything. They have much more to do with having the courage to die, the courage to die continually.

Finding the courage to go to the places that scare us cannot happen without compassionate inquiry into the workings of ego.

In the same way, if we see our so-called limitations with clarity, precision, gentleness, goodheartedness, and kindness and, having seen them fully, then let go, open further, we begin to find that our world is more vast and more refreshing and fascinating than we had realized before. In other words, the key to feeling more whole and less shut off and shut down is to be able to see clearly who we are and what we're doing.

relax gradually and wholeheartedly into the ordinary and obvious truth of change.

Life is a good teacher and a good friend

Let the hard things in life break you. Let them effect you. Let them change you. Let these hard moments inform you. Let this pain be your teacher. The experiences of your life are trying to tell you something about yourself. Don't cop out on that. Don't run away and hide under your covers. Lean into it.

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

The problem is that the desire to change is fundamentally a form of aggression toward yourself. The other problem is that our hang-ups, unfortunately or fortunately, contain our wealth. Our neurosis and our wisdom are made out of the same material. If you throw out your neurosis, you also throw out your wisdom.

Chaos should be regarded as extremely good news." – Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche

If we learn to open our hearts, anyone, including the people who drive us crazy, can be our teacher." - "You are the sky. Everything else – it's just the weather."-

Hell is just resistance to life.

maybe the only enemy is that we don't like the way reality is *now* and therefore wish it would go away fast. but what we find as practitioners is that nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know.

everything that occurs in our confused mind we can regard as the path.

It's a peculiar thing to take a step forward in middle age, but having done it I don't intend to retreat.

Forever, reading has been central, the necessary fix, the support sustem. (...) She read to discover how not to be Charlotte, how to escape the prison of her own mind, how to expand, and experience.

So now we are young still but a better sort of young.