#46

Chinese New Year is over, ate a lot, probably gained some weight too, but I'm trying to slowly increase the intensity of my gym training now. Also, 2 weeks back, my doc said I can reduce my meds by 10mg (from 40 to 30). The first week I felt easily tired even though I didn't do anything strenuous, this week I felt more stabilized, but I find myself having a few recurring negative thoughts that wasn't around before I reduced my dosage, but good thing is, I learnt to manage those thoughts, but it's still an observation I reflected upon on these 2 weeks of reduced meds.

Also, I got down to attend my peer support group session just to realise that there wasn't a session as the facilitator had to attend to an emergency and got cancelled. Whoops. I was kinda looking forward to these sessions now, but I kind of want to do more too, because so far it feels a bit like a classroom setting, but only because a lot of us are shy or have social anxiety. I feel like trying to do more, but we'll see how things goes the next session.

Notes from The Five Invitations

Book is The Five Invitations by Frank Ostaseski.

Frankly, never was a spiritual kind of guy, but this book makes a lot of sense, almost like an instruction manual on how to live a satisfying life.  I don't really agree with some points of course, but I found a lot of useful wisdom in the book, so I might as well share.

Rewritten some notes so that they don't sound too long winded or like you need to take a degree in philosophy or be a Buddhist to understand. Lastly, I think I found a lot of similarities from the experiences described by the author, and the journey I went through during my therapy sessions.



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"When we recognise that death comes to everyone, we appreciate that we are all in the same boat, together. This helps us to become a bit kinder and gentler with one another. "

"We can harness the awareness of death to appreciate the fact that we are alive, to encourage self-exploration, to clarify our values, to find meaning and to generate positive action."

"It is the impermanence of life that gives us perspective. As we come in contact with life's precarious nature, we also come to appreciate it's preciousness. "

"The same suffering helped me to empathetically connect with others' pain."

"It was possible to gather up the suffering in my life, and alchemically change it into the fuel for selfless service - all without making a big deal about it."

"Too many people gone to their deaths feeling themselves to be victims of circumstance, suffering ill consequences because of factors beyond their control, or worse yet, beliving that they were the sole cause of their problems. As a result, many people die in distress, guilt and fear."

"Imagine if we regarded dying as a final stage of growth that held an unprecedented opportunity for transformation. Could we turn toward death like a master teacher and ask "How, then,shall I live?""

"Ordinary people at the end of their lives develop profound insights and engage in a powerful process of transformation that helped them to emerge as someone larger, more expansive, and much more real than the small, separate selves they had previously taken themselves to be.

This is a transcendence of tragedy. The discovery of this capacity regularly occurs for many people in the final months, days , or sometimes even minutes of life"

"If the possibility of such transformation exists at the time of dying, it also exists here and now."

"We already have everything we need for this journey in life. It all exists within us. We don't need someone special to access our innate qualities and utilise them in the service of greater freedom and transformation."

"The five invitations honour the lessons I have learned from sitting bedside with so many dying patients. They have served me well with coping with death, and equally relevant in living a life of integrity. They can be applied just as  aptly to people dealing with all sorts of transitions and crises.

1) Don't wait
2) Welcome Everything, push away nothing
3) Bring your whole self to the experience
4) Find a place of rest in the middle of things
5) Cultivate don't know mind

To be understood these five practices, they have to be lived into and realised through action"


First Invitation : Don't wait

"Death is always with us, everything is constantly changing, Nothing is permanent. This can frighten and inspire us, but the message is clear, Don't wait."

"Embracing the truth that all things inevitably must end encourages us not to wait in order to begin living each moment in a manner that is deeply engaged. "

"Instead of pinning our hopes on a better future, we focus on the present and being grateful for what we have in front of us right now. We say 'I love you' more often because we realise the importance of human connection. We become kinder,more compassionate and more forgiving."

"Don't wait is a pathway to fulfillment and an antidote to regret."

"Mostly, we imagine death will come later. No sense worrying about it too much now. 'Later' creates the comfortable illusion of a safe distance. But constant change, impermanence, is not later. It is right now. Change is the norm."

"We partake in a mini-celebration of impermanence with every well-prepared meal consumed with enjoyment."

"Usually, we seek happiness through trying to arrange the world in such a way that we meet things that are pleasant and avoid what is unpleasant. We fool ourselves because sometimes we can manipulate the conditions of our lives to bring us temporary happiness. It feels good in the moment, but as soon as the moment passes, we are looking for the next satisfying experience or taste."

"Not living in harmony of the truth that change is the one constant in life will cause us no end of suffering. It strengthens our ignorance and sets up habits of craving, defense and regret. These habits harden into character and frequently shows up as obstacles to peace at time of dying"

"Instead of clinging on to the past, we come into alignment with the truth of our present circumstances, and then we can let go of the fight. Why wait until we are dying to be free of struggle?"

"When we embrace impermanence, a certain grace enters our lives. We can treasure experiences, we can feel deeply without clinging, free to savour life, and tolerate change better, and essentially, be more appreciative and resilient."

"Coming together inevitably means parting. This is the nature of life."

"Four basic elements that makes up life:
Earth - hardness and softness
Water - fluidity and cohesiveness
Fire - coolness and heat
Air - stillness and motion"

Earth element fades as patients complain that their legs or feet have gone numb, more difficult to arouse, unresponsive.

Water element dissolves through an inability to swallow fluids, urinary or bowel incontinence, and slowing of blood circulation.

Fire element goes out by displaying fluctuating body temperature. Infections may rise or a slowing metabolism may cause the skin to become cool, while the heat gathered in the center of the body.

At the final stage of death comes the dissolving of air element, people frequently exhibit dramatic changes in breathing patterns - slow and fast breathing with long gaps between exhales and inhales.

"Earth dissolves into water. Water dissolves into fire. Fire dissolves into air. Air dissolves into space. Space dissolves into consciousness.

"Death is much like birth, with everyone's attention naturally focused on the simplicity of breath."

"We habitually string ourselves together with various shiny ornamentations to shape a positive image, sometimes inflating our capacities or importance. Conversely, we may add fuel to the fire of a negative self-concept and exaggerate flaws and weaknesses. We know intrinsically that this construction we carry around and project to the world is not substantial or real, yet we invest in it and come to mistake it for reality."

"Something comes along and exposes what seemed so solid. We realise that we are constantly changing impressions and representations; that our story is held together by nothing more than spit and glue and habit. We see that identity is not a static state."

"The self is not a separate static thing but a process, or actually a network of interconnected processes. To live means to die as a small being moment after moment."

"Our impermanence binds us to every other human being, empathy arises through an appreciation of our transience and an understanding of our interconnectedness."

"Hope is a subtle, sometimes unconscious attitude of heart and mind that is an essential resource in this human life. It is the ingredient that supplies the motivation for us to get up in the morning and look forward to the possibilities of a new day."

"Hope takes us beyond the rational. At times, this can be invaluable to our survival. Yet at other times, when misunderstood, it can plunge us into delusion and become a hindrance to facing the facts of life."

"To discern the real value of hope, we must draw a line between hope and expectation. Hope is an optimising force that moves us and all of life toward harmony. It is an abiding state of being, a hidden wellspring within us. "

"Hope that is active has an imaginative daring to it, which helps us to realise our unity with all life and find the resourcefulness required to act on its behalf. It energizes us to engage in activities that we imagine will enrich our future."

"Yet our usual kind of hope is little more than wishful thinking. It's frequently tied to an almost childlike belief, sometimes even blind faith, that an external agency or authority will being about what we desire. Driven by our preference for a different set of conditions, this conventional view of hope is a rejection of what is present for us in the here and now."

"Ordinary hope disguised as expectation is fixated on a specific outcome. This hope gets conflated with desire for a certain future result. It becomes object-focused. The quandary is that when the outcome isn't achieved, then object isn't grasped, then our hopes are dashed."

"Attaching our happiness to a specific outcome causes us all sorts of suffering. To manage that distress, we attempt to control everything that is happening around us, but we have no control over the moods of others, winning the lottery, or even receiving a cancer diagnosis. The law of impermanence trumps our best-laid plans."

"Attachment to outcome posing as hope only generates anxiety and interferes our ability to be present to our experience of life as it is undfolding in this very moment."

"Hope can shift with compassionate support. it  stops being about managing the symptoms we did not choose and can not avoid, and instead, turns toward discovering the value in living fully given our current conditions. Often it transforms into mature hope, a hope that takes us inside ourselves and toward finding the good in the experience."

"Mature hope requires both a clear intention and a simultaneous letting go. This hope is not dependent on outcome. In fact, hope is tied to uncertainty because we never know what is going to happen next. "

"When we relax our single-minded vision of the future - the idea that this is the only way for things to happen, we are no longer trapped by our conventional view of hope."

"The energizing quality of mature hope helps us to remain open to the possibility that while life may not turn out the way we first thought, opportunities we never imagined may also arise."

"Most of us choose comfort over truth. We don't grow and transform in our comfort zones. We grow when we realise we are no longer able to control all the conditions of our lives, and are therefore challenged to change ourselves. When we release our clinging to what used to be and our craving for what we think should be, we are free to embrace the truth of what is in this moment."

"Mature hope embraces the truth that no matter what we do or don't do, things will change. Change in constant and inevitable. Hope for an unchanging world quickly becomes discouragement."

"Truth telling seems necessary for a future based on healing and mature hope."

"Perhaps we might accept our past, ourselves, others, and the continually changing conditions of our lives 'as is' - neither good nor bad, but workable."

"The present moment includes the past and also the potency for the future"

"This is where the energy of hope has a place - not as a wish to be fulfilled or a plan to be formulated and executed, but in how we meet the ever-changing moment. The present moment includes all time."

"The present moment can be best described as the flow of life. We are continually being shaped by it, and we are shaping it through the way we meet and respond to it."

"Don't wait is an encouragement to step fully into life. Don't miss this moment waiting for the next one to arrive. Don't wait to act on what is most important. Don't get stuck in the hope for a better past or future; be present."

"When I'm not so full of the hope of expectation, I can see more of the picture. I see opportunities that I missed before."

"Non-waiting is relaxed and spacious, a way of allowing experience to come toward us without the need to reach out and grab it. We come to know our experience by revelation, not by wrestling meaning out of it or by manipulating it into being the way we want it to be."

"Patience implies expectation, waiting for the next moment, just doing it in a calmer way."

"The experience of non-waiting is more like continuous contact with reality. Whatever the experience,good or bad, we give our full attention to it,to what is happening right now."

"Loving and letting go are inseparable. You can't love and cling at the same time. Too often we mistake attachment for love."

"Love is expansive, allowing, caring and connective. Attachment masquerades as love. It looks and smells like love, but it's a cheap imitation. You can feel how attachment grasps and is driven by need and fear. Love is selfless; attachment is self-centered. Love is freeing; attachment is possessive. When we love, we relax, we don't hold on so tightly and we naturally let go more easily."

"Forgiveness is gaining freedom from the indictments, recriminations and judgments that cause us so much suffering. Hold on to our pain is, quite simply, not in our best interests."

"The refusal to forgive is a way we resist life. We can be very loyal to our suffering. Yet when we cling tightly to our past, we hold on not just to the memories, but also the tension and emotional states that go along with them."

"Forgiveness allows us to let go of pain not by sugarcoating it with positive thoughts, but by allowing our experience to come forward so that we can touch our pain with mercy. We don't have to let old hurts continue to define who we are in the here and now. By forgiving, we can release ourselves from suffering that has been confining us ever since the event took place."

"Forgiveness is often a long and difficult process."

"Forgiveness is a fierce practice. It takes real strength, a willingness to be with what is difficult. It asks us to face our demons. It requires absolute honesty. We must be willing to see things as they are, bearing witness to painful acts that happened to us or the harm we may have done to others."

"Sometimes we need to rage, or grapple with our guilt. Sometimes we fall into a deep sorrow. Forgiveness isn't about squelching these emotions. It is about facing them with kindness, paying close attention to what is getting in the way of our letting go."

"We forgive because there is no point in waiting to unburden ourselves,no point in wasting time by holding ourselves back with old resentments. We forgive because we don't want to reach the end of our lives filled with sighs and regrets. We forgive not because it is bad not to, but because holding on to our pain hurts too much and keeps u from loving fully."

"When my anger confused me, when obstacles came up, my intention served as a compass guiding me back home to forgiveness. Some days was impossible. I would become overwhelmed by powerful resistance or seduced by doubt. Returning again and again to my love and my desire to let go of my own pain, I would touch my own confusion with mindfulness and mercy."

"Trying to bury or ignore this unpleasantness was futile - it would only resurface on its own volition. I knew I had to experience it in an authentic way. I would move directly into sensing how much it hurt me to hold on to the pain. I would allow myself to feel my grief and suffering, my burning hatred and disgust, and then touch those feelings with mercy."

"Many of us can't even remember what happened to cause us such fury in the first place. What we do remember, what we hold on to, it turns out, is not the story or even the hurt so much as the resentment we have built up as a result."

"We confuse forgiving with forgetting. We are afraid that if we forgive, we will forget and the harm may happen again."

"However, we don't need to cling to the mental tension and emotional anguish to benefit from the lessons learned. We don't need to punish ourselves - or anyone else - in order not to forget. We don't need our bitterness to prove that we have been wronged."

"Forgiveness is the tool for removing the roadblocks to our hearts and liberating us from the destructive hold on our past pain."

"Outrage can indeed fuel change, but wanton anger is an act of ego, a knee-jerk reaction and a cheap substitute for true strength. When we access the strength hidden in our anger, we have the capacity to take dynamic action and resolve to stand powerfully against injustice when needed."

"After carrying the pain for so long, we wonder, who would we be without it? Our resentment, our self-righteousness, seeing ourselves only as casualties- these feelings, in spite of being a burden, become familiar. We know this is how it feels, this is who I am. We would rather stay with what is known than unburden ourselves of the negativity. This urge to cling to our sense of having been wronged in the past can last a lifetime. "

"Forgiveness only takes one person: you. We can forgive someone without ever having a conversation with him or her."

"Forgiveness does not ask us to welcome people back into our lives, but it empowers us to let ourselves off the hook."

"Gradually, we shift away from being someone who is only afraid of pain to becoming one who is capable of embracing it. In the process, we free ourselves to be more of who we really are, unconfined, able to grow and re-imagine ourselves."

"All forgiveness is self-forgiveness, and is always for our own benefit. When we forgive, we give ourselves the medicine that is most helpful, touching ourselves with radical self-acceptance."

"Don't wait until you find yourself on your deathbed to begin the process of forgiving those who have hurt you or those you have wronged. Allow the fragile nature of life to show you what's most important."

Second Invitation : Welcome everything, push away nothing

"Saying you're welcome (as a response to thank you) instead of 'don't mention it', 'no problem' etc. means to send an invitation."

"The word welcome confronts us; it asks us to temporarily suspend our usual rush to judgment and to simply be open to what is happening."

"When we are open and receptive, we have options. We are free to discover and to learn how to respond skillfully to anything we encounter. We can't be free if we are rejecting any part of our lives. Our well-being is not solely dependent on what's happening in our external reality; it comes from within."

"Openness welcomes paradox and contradiction. It permits whatever emerges to emerge. Openness means keeping out minds and hearts available to new information, experiences, and opportunities for growth. It means having tolerance for the unknown. It means welcoming the bad times and the good times as equally valid experiences."

"Denial breeds ignorance and fear. i cannot be free if I am rejecting any part of my experience. The rejected experience will keep showing up, finding new ways to express itself. It will always be the cause of our suffering. We must let go of our opposition to the experiences we are trying to avoid."

"Welcome everything, push away noting is not just about learning to welcome changing conditions or moving beyond our preferences. It is about accepting life 'as is'."

"To welcome everything and push away nothing is an invitation to discover deeper dimension of our humanity, to tap into something beyond our habitual selves. We can gain access to some part of us that includes, but is not driven by, our reactivity.

"Welcoming what is, as it is, we move toward reality. We may not like or agree with all that we encounter. However, when we argue with reality,we lose every time. We waste energy and exhaust ourselves with the insistence that life be otherwise."

"In spite of what we have been led to believe, which is that destiny rests firmly in our own hands, we often have little control over the external circumstances of our lives. However, we have a great deal of choice about how we relate to and learn from the cards life delas us."

"Until we come to accept life with all its madness and inspiration, we will feel cut off, separate, isolated. We will view the world around us as a dangerous and frightening place."

"We can practice meeting small, unpleasant conditions with grace, noticing our own relationship to what is occuring."

"Acceptance is not resignation. It is an opening to possibility, and openness is the basis for a skillful response to life."

"To be open is to allow things to be known, to be free of concealment, not to keep secrets from ourselves. Sometimes this requires necessary pain, like when we lance an abscess or open to a psychological wound. Openness is essential for true healing to be possible."

"We tend to protection ourselves from experiences and situations we don't like, but there is a sense of liberation and confidence that gets built up within us when we do the opposite, when we push away nothing."

"Awareness offers a completely different vantage point that doesn't need to push away anything. When we engage awareness, we enable an open and unbiased awareness that allows us to see through the obstacles that are clouding our view."

"This invitation is neither foolish nor idealistic. It is eminently practical. Accepting life as is means that we make peace with things as they are rather than trying to force them to be the way we want them to be."

"To be human is much more than being born, getting an education, finding the right partner, and getting a pretty house on a nice street just so that you can sleep, wake, work, to to bed and do it all over again. It is an invitation to feel everything, to come into direct contact with the strange, beautiful, horrible and often perfectly ordinary thing we call life. It is an opportunity to be conscious of the fact that some of us will make love while others make war. To recognise the truth that there are babies like my granddaughter born into loving arms and caressed by a mother who kisses her bright future into her child's cheeks, and there are babies like Carolyn, a woman I knew whose parents left her in a dumpster. To embrace the night screams in refugee camps and the giggling of children in living rooms under tents made of couch pillows and bedsheets. There is devastation and hopelessness, and there is passion and holy commitment to creating a better future for everyone. There is me writing and you reading and the separation between us, and there is the unity we feel almost immediately when we are reminded that there is love."

"When confronted by harsh realities of life, or even some small discomfort or inconvenience, our instinctive reaction is to run in the opposite direction, but we can't escape suffering."

"When we believe suffering is a mistake, it's no wonder we do everything in our power to steer clear of it. Out avoidance instinct is also due to the fact that our culture has decided that suffering has no value."

"We get some temporary relief by ignoring problems or substituting a more pleasant experience for an unpleasant one, but such benefits are short-lived. What sticks around for the long run is the habit of self-deception and its negative consequences."

"Suffering is exacerbated by avoidance. We accept a limited perspective of the situation and a restricted view of ourselves. When we push back, hoping to get rid of a difficult experience, we are actually encapsulating it. In short, what we resist persists."

"When we allow the experience by creating space and acceptance for it, we find that our suffering is not a static, monolithic thing, but rather it is composed of many elements, including our attitudes toward it. Understanding this, we can work to alleviate the underlying reactions that exacerbate our problems so that we might ease our suffering."

"Most people don't think suffering applies to them. To them, they imagine children starving in a famine-struck african country or refugees fleeing war. Unfortunately, suffering is everywhere. "

"Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional. We cannot escape from pain, but we can do something to else our suffering."

"If you are alive, you will experience pain. Everyone has different pain threshold. Physical pain is the nervous system's internal alarm, your body reacting to potentially damaging stimulus. Pain can also take emotional form, such as the crush of heartbreak or the sadness of loss."

"Suffering is about perception and interpretation. It is our mental and emotional relationship to what is first perceived as unpleasant or undesirable. Our stories and beliefs about what is happening shape our interpretation of it. When things don't go according to plan, some people believe that they are helpless victims,and leads to resignation and apathy."

"Without suffering, how would I feel empathy for others or meet their suffering with a compassionate response?"

"We invite in what hurts; we sit down with it and get to know it really well. In this way, we come to understand the nature of the experience and the deeper causes not always evident at first glance. In the end, the only way through suffering is for us to allow what is happening, welcoming the experience and introducing awareness and compassion where denial was predominant."

"We sometimes fail to remember that pain has an essential role in our lives. If we didn't feel the discomfort from the heat of a fire, we would burn our fingers. The painful emotions of shame, loneliness and guilt highlight deeper troubles in our relationships. Pain can motivate us to take action, to identify and address its causes, and even to seek happiness."

"The journey through life is already pretty difficult. There's plenty of unavoidable pain. But if we are not aligned with the way life actually works, we add a great deal of unnecessary suffering to the mix."

"There can be no suffering without suffering. It is the medicine many of us crave when we realise that suffering is an attitude of mind.  We have a choice to break the momentum of habit. We can release old attitudes and turn toward the difficulty to see what it has to teach us, instead of trying to avoid, deny, endure, or become resentful of the suffering."

"Humans are amazing. I find our courage astounding. People everywhere experience unbelievable hardships and yet they go on, they turn inward, they recover and they live. Sometimes, they act with enormous compassion toward others who have suffered similarly or who may yet in times to come."

"When we were younger, we never thought of death. As we age, death becomes familiar. That doesn't mean I want to die, but it means we become less afraid of death as we get older."

"When we welcome suffering, it shakes us out of our complacency. It can bring clarity and help us find meaning, without which the pain might be too much to bear."

"When we bear witness to our own suffering, we stop separating ourselves from it. We realise that it is an integral part of the human condition; it's not personal to us. This perspective, in turn, gives rise to compassion and action."

"We not only come to terms with out deepest fears, but also connect wit others who have similar wounds. We are motivated to find ways to reduce suffering - our own and other people's."

"Turning toward our suffering may plunge us into the very sadness, fear and pain that we usually try so hard to avoid. But if we are willing to brave the darkness by welcoming everything and pushing away nothing, the energy that had been consumed by our resistance to life's unwelcome events will now be available to contribute to healing, building resilience and acting with love."

"I certainly know the experience of being identified as a victim. And I had developed a distorted sense of the wholesome rescuer. But in that moment, the perpetrator was also present. I was now the one allowing my views to cut me off from others who had nothing to do with my wounds. It was evident to me that all three needed to be welcomed, known and held in love. "

"Turning toward our suffering is a critical part of welcoming everything and pushing away nothing. This means that no part of ourselves or our experience can be left out; not the joy and wonder, nor the pain and anguish. All are woven throughout the very fabric of our lives. When we embrace that truth, we step more fully into life."

"In the horror of my own suffering, I always had held our the hope that one day someone would rescue me. I had imagined that I would be saved by love coming toward me. It was the opposite. I was rescued when love came through me. I discovered love through acts of kindness, not offered to me, but coming from me."

"We glimpsed at love without limitation. This is an entirely different order of love, unlike the commerce-like reciprocal exchange that characterises many romantic relationships. It recognises and responds to the intrinsic goodness of the human heart. It is both profoundly receptive and dynamically expressive."

"This facet of love represents a more universal aspiration that all beings will find happiness and the causes of happiness. It exists both before and beyond conditions. It is not something to be achieved by our personalities. It is not an idealistic love to be attained by following a certain path, nor is it the result of reaching a special spiritual state. It is always present. In a way, it is the background for all experience, the very essence of our being."

"This loves lives within us and is always available. Dissolving our defenses, it enables us to grapple with the demons of negative self-image, shame, confusion and unresolved loss, rather than to continuing to avoid them. Then we can heal."

"The tension and holding that forges our armour to keep out the pain instead cuts us off from love, dulling our sensitivity, steeling us to our experience, and locking out the tenderness, comfort, mercy and joy that we need. Often, we remain frightened behind this shield and grow increasingly isolated from other people and ourselves."

"This love is the source that allows us to welcome everything and push away nothing. The sort of fearless openness required to turn toward our suffering is only possible within the spacious receptivity of love."

 "Love doesn't mean we should tolerate bad behaviour or say yes when we need to say no. We will fall prey to doubt, unworthiness, boredom, desires and resentments. Love provides us with a way of approaching life that softens the identification that keeps unskillful habits from hardening into character."

"One of love's most exquisite capacities is its ability to embrace whatever it comes into contact with - even if, at first g lance, the situation, experience, or person seems unlovable. When we feel love, it doesn't seem to concern itself with who or what we should love. Loving awareness helps us to embrace our sadness, loneliness, fear, depression and physical pain. "

"If love is bountiful and endless, why do we get caught up in scarcity, feeling that we must hold on to our beloved ones so tightly? In part, it is because we confuse love and attachment."

"Attachment likes to impersonate love. It says 'I will love you if you give me what I need'. Love is focused on generosity; attachment is obsessed with getting needs met. Love is an expression of our most essential nature; attachment is an expression of the personality. Love engenders faithfulness, aligning with our values, moving with purpose; attachment clings in fear and grasps tightly to a particular end result. Love is selfless and encourages freedom; attachment is self-centered and engenders possessiveness. Attachment leaves scars. Love inclines us to gratefulness."

"We come to believe that our ability to feel pleasure and happiness, to have our needs met, is dependent on the words and action of something or someone outside of ourselves. But love encompasses everything. We can love someone even if we don't agree with them and even if we don't like all their habits. Love is not blind to our day-to-day challenges, yet it is not limited by them"

"Love is the very human quality that allows us to welcome everything, not just what we prefer most. Love is the motivation that enables us to move toward fear - not to conquer it, but in order to include it so that we might learn from it. In love, there is no separation. Caring for all things is therefore a natural action of love."

"When we view reality from the vantage point of our personalities - from a small, separate self - we are constantly looking for what distinguishes us from one another. If we live from the vantage point of boundless love, we begin to see all the points of connection that joins us together."

Third Invitation : Bring your whole self to the experience

"To be whole, we need to include, accept and connect all parts of ourselves. We need acceptance of our conflicting qualities and the seeming incongruity of our inner and outer worlds. Wholeness does not mean perfection. It means no part left out."

"It's common and perfectly natural when caught in the gripes of fear to become defensive, controlling, emotionally unavailable and irritating, and to lose patience with ourselves and others. We want to feel safe, so we cling to roles with their established rules and prescriptive behaviours."

"When we disown parts of ourselves, we tend to judge others who display those same qualities. We lay claim to moral superiority and this can create a chasm between people that is difficult to cross."

"Roles, like most things, are fluid. When parents get older, roles reverse and children frequently step into being caregivers. If I am the nurturer in my family and I get sick, someone has to agree to take care of me. If I'm an alcoholic and I get treatment, suddenly I am no longer the black sheep of the family, and I have to be let back in to participate in decision making."

"When we overt-identify with a role, it defines us, confines us, and reduces our capacity for conscious choice. It sets up expectation about how life is supposed to proceed. That means more fragmentation, more fixed positions and entrenched beliefs, and less access to our innate wisdom."

"We are not our roles, and we are not our conditions. You  may have cancer or bi-polar disorder, but you are not your disease. You may be born into wealth or poverty, but you are not rich or poor. "

"We are first and foremost human beings, with all of the complexity, fragility and wonder that life encompasses. When we only look through the lens of a role, it narrows our vision of the world. We don't see things and people as they actually are, but rather project our story onto them."

"In the increasingly technological environments of medical centers, where treatment protocols change rapidly, clinicians frequently are pressured to accomplished more with fewer resources. As a result, it's easy for them to become task-focused. Human beings are not task delivery systems. In caring for each other, we must attend to both task and relationship. Without a relationship to each other and the realization of the intrinsic values of purpose, meaning and spiritual growth, there is a loss of soul."

"We've all encountered a doctor who is fulfilling the role, performing the job, but is not present with us. Soul is about presence. When we get stuck in our roles, we stop caring. Patients feel ignored and objectified, and their autonomy is lessened. Often, they actually end up suffering more from the treatment they receive, enduring their suffering without complaint while tolerating all sorts of unpleasant side effects."

"Nurses and doctors, people with good hearts, also frequently become closed to their own pain. Driven ruthlessly by the unrealistic expectations of the systems in which they work, trained to use coping strategies that have them ignoring what hurts most, they lose touch with their compassionate hearts. Often, they meet their own discomfort and alienation with rejection instead of love. When they are overworked, they become shut down; molded by their training, they see only symptoms and not the person in front of them."

"Most of us are naturally inclined to help people. Our first instinct upon hearing of someone's difficulties is to try to fix them. While our intentions may be genuine, we  can be blissfully insensitive to the way we impact others."

"We like our opinions. There's nothing wrong with having a point of view. What's problematic is imposing it on others. Giving people advice that they can't use and don't want won't make you feel less helpless. If you feel helpless, you might try acknowledging your helplessness first, at least to yourself, before you speak out or take any action. If you haven't been asked for suggestions, chances are they're neither wanted nor appreciated. I always find it best to inquire before offering guidance."

"Too often, caregivers tend to amplify the patient's fear or exacerbate the condition of confusion by focusing exclusively on problem solving. In doing so, the patient loses contact with their innate resourcefulness."

"I don't heal because my problems are being solved. I heal by reconnecting with what I feel I lost in the fear and contraction. I heal by connecting to my innate capacity to heal. This is felt as self-acceptance, a quality of openness to my condition that is expanded and strengthened through the dynamic companionship of compassion. It breeds courage and allows us to go toward and learn from the suffering."

"Listen generously, as if the other person has all the resources that they need inside of them. Just respect and receive what is being offered, understanding it is not even important. Often, a receptive silence heals more than all the well-meaning words."

"Authenticity requires trust in a deep inner wisdom and the willingness to bring that wisdom into conscious action. Wisdom is not about age or expertise, tools or roles."

"To find our way home, we have to remember what called our souls to serve in the first place. We have to discover how to love what we do, even if we don't always do what we love."

"In order to bring our whole self to the experience, we must address the often unconscious, corrosive voice of the inner critic. It is the primary obstacle to self-acceptance, trust, and the expansion of our dynamic potential. It stops all growth, arrests inner development, steals our power and make negative self-talk the norm. Furthermore, the judge impedes our ability to connect and empathize with others. Chances are if you're extremely critical of yourself, you'll be a harsh critic of others."

"When we bring our whole self forward, we include our brokenness. We make room for blemishes as well as purity, strength as well as vulnerability, success as well as screwups. Judgments focuses on whats wrong : it feeds an 'either/or' mentality. Embracing wholeness is a loving act of reclamation, a 'both/and' way of meeting life."

"When we were small, the adults had all the power. We were completely dependent upon them for our budding self-perception, and more importantly, our survival. These grown ups imbued us with their values and standards. They taught us the basic rules they believed we would need in order to cope in the world. This natural socialization process only becomes a problem when it spills over into a forced attempt to align a child's behaviour with the adult's view of life. Most grown ups are not ogres, yet inevitably they pass along their unconscious assumptions, unskillful strategies, prejudices and biases from their own unexamined lives."

"We don't need the critic's constant appraisal and attacks, humiliation, repression, rejection or the suffering it generates."

"I find the inner critic berates me more than it motivates me. It is neither a conscience nor a reliable moral guide, and it isn't the voice of wisdom. Yes, there may be some kernal of truth wrapped up in the critic's commentary. It may have a useful tidbit of information to offer, but I certainly don't need its delivery system. It has a particular tone of voice that is often mean, dismissive and manipulative."

"Some of us have a mistaken loyalty to our critic. We think it keeps us sharp and leads to more critical thinking we need in our jobs or to understand the world. Looking closer, we see that the mechanism of the critic is pretty simple; after all, it was formed when we were children."

"The critic doesn't believe in our basic human goodness. It only believes in rules and moral codes. Psychologically, the critic is the protector of ego. It denies everything else. It doesn't trust your heart to know how you feel."

"Judgment is the harsh, aggressive habit that shuts down the conversation, binds us to the past and old behaviours and closes off our access to other capacities."

"Discernment makes space, helps us to have perspective, and allows more of our humanity to show up. Discernment helps wisdom to emerge and enables us to choose a more beneficial future. Our innate discriminating wisdom is a kind, more objective voice that is available to all of us. It can differentiate, discern and intelligently guide us forward."

"People don't usually think of wisdom as innate. They believe it is something you must acquire over the course of a lifetime through experience. It's true, there is an analytical wisdom that needs to be trained and developed over time. There is also an innate wisdom, only if we listen carefully to what it has to offer."

"As we move through the vicissitudes of daily life, our essential nature passes through cultural, familial and societal conditioning. As that contact occurs, the qualities of our essential nature go through a process of constriction.  Then, instead of being expressed in a free, open, natural way, the various qualities appear distorted."

"Strength gets tangled up in desires or expectations and gets expressed as frustration, anger and destructiveness. Compassion passes through fear and shows up as pity of an obsessive need to fix others and protect ourselves from pain."

"The critic is particularly fond of distorting wisdom. In fact, the critic likes to substitute its own voice for the softer, gentler guide of our inner wise person. The critic says,' Trust me, I know you so well. I've been through this before'. Wisdom says,' Relax into your experience. You can trust yourself to know what to do'.

"We should do our best to hold our imperfections with kindness. We can bring self-acceptance forward, befriend ourselves, and get curious about the twists in our innate qualities rather than trying to beat them into submission."

"In order to stop the pattern of self-betrayal that occurs when we are at the mercy of an unchecked inner critic, we have to stand up for ourselves. We have to act on our own behalf. I find it helpful to remember how you reacted as a child when your parents didn't approve, or when an authority figure imposed rules on you that you didn't think were fair. What was your automatic response?"

"Some of us move away by withdrawing, hiding, keeping secrets and silencing ourselves. We avoid conflict."

"Some of us move toward by seeking to please and accommodate, negotiate and persuade.Maybe you tried to always be well behaved in order to earn approval."

"Some of us move against by trying to gain power over others. We rebel or fight back. Maybe you talked back, yelled, acted with hostility and did what you wanted."

"The problem with these strategies is that they still give the inner critic all the power. We remain caught up in reacting to authority instead of creatively choosing our own path. We need strength to undo this old habit."

"Essential strength comes from repeated encounters with our basic nature, through which we develop confidence in its presence and wise guidance. That becomes the foundation on which we stand, the essential strength that we carry into action."

"Telling the emotional truth, expressing disinterest in the critic's advice, using humour, staying connected to your physical center, harnessing your strength - all these strategies are meant to restore our contact with the dynamic expansiveness that is our essential nature."

"Most of us have notions from our childhood religious experiences about how a 'good spiritual person' ought to function in the world. I'm a Buddhist, so I'm not supposed to get angry. Matthew had been raised an evangelical Christian, so he wasn't supposed to be gay. Really, these ideas are just our inner critics projecting themselves onto every dimension of our lives. The voice of the authority figure who lives in our heads can just as easily come from cultural conventions or religious canons as from parents or teachers."

"Acceptance is a loving act of an open heart. Approval is generally tied up with judgement. Our hunger for approval is partly why we are so easily hooked by the critic. We try to fend off unworthiness by seeking our value from external authorities whose voices we long ago internalised. We hope that if we get enough, do enough, change enough, one day we will finally be enough."

"True acceptance begins an alchemical process. The undesirable can be changed into the desirable by mindfully embracing our flaws, shortcomings, warts, and all those rejected, painful and scary aspects of ourselves. Even the seemingly unlovable pieces are loved because they are seen as part of the whole. We expose our imagined imperfections to the fierce fires of wisdom, strength, love and in doing so, we learn to turn lead into gold. Confusion dissolves into clarity. We discover courage in our vulnerability. We melt internal enemies and transform them into friends."

"Mindfulness is a de-conditioning. It cultivates a merciful, awake presence of mind that no longer blocks the heart. Then things are free to be as they are. We allow the difficult, dark and dense. We become more intimate with our pain and difficulties, our joy and beauty, embodying our full humanity and discovering an ever-deeper, vast sense of wholeness."

"When we try to push away difficult emotions or bodily sensations that accompany them, we actually keep it in place. When we lock them in, we don't give them the space they need to unfold and reveal themselves, to show us what they have to teach."

"When we repress an experience, it does not go away. It still lurks below the surface, encapsulated in its original form. Repressed anger easily turns to depression, resentment or fear. Repression generates mental reactivity and skews our perceptions. "

"Emotional reactivity means that our response is out of proportion to a given stimulus. Unconscious or unresolved feelings get triggered and erupt with an intensity that overwhelms us. Frequently, we act out on others. We kick the cat, rage at being stuck in traffic, or otherwise try to displace these uncomfortable feelings because we are caught by the desire to discharge them."

"We hold the emotions and the related material in a caring way. We accept the reality of their presence, regardless of whether we like them or not. With equanimity, we can regulate, reflect and reappraise. Breathing, sensing and bringing mindfulness to the physical experience stabilizes our attention and allowed the body to become a safe container in which emotions can be embodied and regulated."

"Then we can reflect on the possible consequences of acting out the emotion or unnecessarily dwelling on it, the potential of hurting ourselves and others. We can re-evaluate the automatic negative response and possibly even reinterpret our perceptions of events to discover a new meaning that helps us relate to our emotions in a constructive way."

"Most often, we think of grief as an overwhelming response to a singular event, usually the death of someone we love. Yet, when we look more closely, we see that grief has been our companion for a good part of our lives. It is the everyday grief, the response to the multiple losses and little deaths that occur almost daily. The loss of a treasured piece of jewelry, being let go from a job, the abrupt breakup of a relationship, infertility, financial crises, kids going off to school, the loss of our vitality or a physical or mental capacity, the loss of control, the loss of our dreams. Everyday grief arises when we remember how the carelessness of our actions has caused harm to others. It comes in moments of not being recognised, at times when our expectations aren't met. Sometimes our grief is about what we've had and lost, and sometimes it is about what we never got to have in the first place."

"In managing the grief of others and ourselves, we are generally afraid and impatient. Our own unexplored fear of grief can lead us to hurry others along the path of healing. Grief is a deep,slow process of the soul. It cannot be rushed."

"We need to allow for the full spectrum of expressions of grief, from the numbness and absence of expression to wild, out-of-control displays of emotion. Grief is unpredictable and uncontrollable."

"Our fear of this lack of control leads us to ideas about managing our grief or getting over it. It is important to understand that loss doesn't go away, it lasts a lifetime. It is our relationship to a particular loss that changes. It won't always hold the same intensity for us, or take the same expression. But the grief is a natural human response to loss will remain, and our resistance to it will only intensify the pain."

"In challenging our notions of control, grief cracks our defensive shell of invulnerability. It exposes the ways we hide from the truth and asks us to acknowledge what has always been here but was previously unrecognised : our human frailty."

"There is no right way to grieve, no timetable, no one path. There's certainly no shortcuts through grief. The only way is straight through the middle. We don't get past our pain. We go through it and are transformed by it."

"Initial shock and disbelief that a loved one had died usually give way to guilt and regret. Our capacity to be cruel to ourselves never ceases to amaze me. If only we could stop for a moment and listen to the sounds of our voices, surely our hearts would open to embrace our pain."

"After months of exhausting caregiving, continuously witnessing the suffering of someone we love, we may be ashamed that we feel relief when they die. At other times, we get angry and want to blame somebody, anybody. It is especially confusing when our anger turns toward the person who died. But the truth is we might be angry at that person for leaving us behind with all this pain and loneliness and confusion."

"There's no avoiding this painful states of mind. If you're supporting a survivor or you are yourself a survivor, it is important to acknowledge the feelings and understand that they are perfectly normal. Some people cry oceans of tears, others feel numb. Men grieve differently from women. There is no right way, only your way."

"Grief is disorienting. We forget our keys, arrive at places and can't remember why we went there. We can't concentrate. We live in a confused reality. This goes on for a while after the death of someone you love."

Losing can go on for weeks, months or even years. When someone we love dies, we keep on losing that person over and over again, especially at holidays, in times of difficult decisions, and in those little personal moments we long to share. During this period, we realise most clearly the roles that the other person has played in our lives, and we grieve the loss of those also."

"If our parents die, we may find ourselves feeling really fragile. They were the buffer standing between us and death, and suddenly, we become much more aware of our own mortality."

"Losing is the time to be around the people whom you trust the most, those who have earned the right to listen. It helps alleviate the feeling of being disconnected from life. Those who have consciously lived through a loss of their own also know the importance of listening without judgment or agenda."

"In this period of losing, it is critical that we allow ourselves to feel the pain. Time and loving attention heal."

"It is not the pain that awakens us; it is our attention to the pain. Our willingness to experience and investigate our suffering gives rise to compassion and kindness. Consistent, loving attention melts our well-constructed defense and unleashes old holdings. We begin to invite the pain into our hearts."

"Loosening is the period in which the knot of our grief is untied. It is a time of renewal. You can't go back to life as it was before because you are a different person now, changed by your journey through grief. But you can begin to embrace life agian, to feel alive again. The intensity of emotions has subsided somewhat. You can remember the loss without being caught up in a stranglehold of grief.

"When we take care of someone we love and do it with great integrity and impeccability, when we feel that we have given ourselves fully and completely to our grief and didn't hold anything back, then we will surely feel great sorrow. But also we will feel gratitude and possibility of opening to a reservoir of joy and love that we may have never known before."

"Everytime we experience a loss, we have another chance to experience life at a greater depth. It opens us to the most essential truths of our lives: the inevitability of impermanence, the causes of suffering and the illusion of separateness."

"In Buddhism, wisdom and compassion are spoken of metaphorically as the two great wings of our practice. Attempts at compassion without wisdom easily become sentimental and mushy. Attempts at wisdom without compassion can seem cold, indifferent and cerebral."

"We human beings are exquisitely unique and differentiated, but not separate. With all our extraordinary differences, we share the same basic nature. When we release ourselves from a narrow sense of separateness, we open to a wider worldview. One that wisely appreciates that we are not alone, nor can we manage this life alone. We recognise that we are tangled up with each other and completely interdependent with everything else."

"We see that caring for another person is, at the heart of it, no different from caring for ourselves. Altruism is a natural expression of that wise understanding - action that arises from the recognition of our common humanity."

"Our capacity to share feelings wit others can be both gratifying and problematic. We may experience vicarious delight when a friend announces they are newly in love. In the same way, when we see someone we love suffer, it can trigger shared emotions. When another person cries in grief, we, too, may share the sadness and begin to cry. "

"It's useful to draw a distinction between empathy and compassion. Empathy is this capacity to feel as the other person. With empathy, we feel with the other person, but in compassion, we feel for the other.

"We need to regulate the initial empathetic response as it is important for those who face continued exposure to suffering (i.e. nurses, therapists, first responders) as they might slip into empathetic overload, which can have a negative impact on our well-being."

"Healthy empathy as described by Carl Rogers :

It means entering the private perceptual world of the other and becoming thoroughly at home in it. It involves being sensitive, moment to moment, to the changing felt meaning which flow in this other person, to the fear or rage or tenderness or confusion or whatever he or she is experiencing. It means temporarily living in the other's life, moving about in it delicately without making judgments; it means sensing meanings of which he or she is scarcely aware, but not trying to uncover totally unconscious feelings, since this would be too threatening. It includes communicating your sensing of the person's world as you look with fresh and unfrightened eyes at elements of which he or she is fearful. To be with another in this way means that for the time being, you lay aside your own views and values in order to enter another's world without prejudice. In some sense it means that you lay aside your self; this can only be done by persons who are secure enough in themselves that they know they will not get lost in what may turn out to be the strange or bizarre world of the other, and that they can comfortably return to their own world when they wish."

"When our nonjudgmental attention responds to exactly what hurts in another, the heart opens. It feels cared for and seen. Compassion is cognizant of the spectrum of considerations, but attuned to what matters most in this moment."

"A misconception many people hold about compassion is that we should help the other person to feel safe, that there is no danger."

"I have found that when I am really present, and grounded in compassion, the other person can sense that and begin to trust and open up - not because there is no danger, but because they feel that they are not alone. Genuine understanding and compassionate companionship offer them the support and encouragement they need in order to go toward what feels dangerous."

"It's easy to imagine that compassion requires some heroic strength that we do not possess. We may believe that we are not up to the task of meeting the suffering of the world. It can be helpful to consider the possibility that compassion is not a quality that we possess, but rather one that we access, inherent in the nature of reality."

"Real altruism isn't self-sacrifice for the benefits of others, arising from some guilt-driven sense that we should be good, we should be nice, we should be kind or helpful. It is a profound recognition that self and other are not fundamentally different, only apparently different. "

"Universal compassion is an innate and essential aspect of existence. It is the foundation of all healing, an underlying source of benevolence and caring. Its nature is impersonal, yet it is always embracing us, even if we didn't know it."

"Everyday compassion gets expressed in daily life, when we help someone, feed the hungry or listen generously to a friend's broken heart. We may be effective or ineffectual in our efforts, but we do the best we can."

"Without everyday compassion, universal compassion is just an abstract idea, a big prayer. If prayers alone were enough to heal the world, we could have ended suffering a long time ago."

"Compassion requires that we get in touch with what hurts. It's the pain, the suffering itself, that invites compassion to manifest. The intelligence of compassion brings forward a kindness that is not trying to get rid of suffering. This goes counter to the ego's wishes. Ego only wants to be protected from pain. Compassion opens to pain."

"We have a closetful of strategies that we employ to keep the unpleasant at bay. Our defenses render us blind and can midlead us about the true sources of our suffering. Fear, anger, guilt, worry, resentment, shame - those are all painful, reactive symptoms. Our psychological defenses can mask deeper dynamics in our psyches, keeping us from understanding the more fundamental causes of our suffering. In this way, often unconscious defenses serve to recycle our suffering."

"With compassion, our defensiveness can relax. When our defenses are down, we can look objectively at our situations and see the true origins of our suffering. Then we can intervene skillfully to address the real causes and not just the symptoms. So another aspect of compassion is the capacity to be with suffering as a means of coming to, and experiencing, more truth and greater freedom."

"In truth, everything is intimately connected, related in a vast network of interdependence. All our thoughts, feelings and actions affect everything else in that network."

"When we look at reality from the vantage point of the separate self, we're constantly searching for what distinguishes us from others. All we see are things falling apart, and suffering around. If we shift to the vantage point of connectedness, we can feel the harmony. We don't completely abandon our personalities, but we adopt more inclusive points of view."

Fourth Invitation : Find a place of rest in the middle of things

"Finding a place of rest isn't about adding another task to your already too-long-to-do list. Nor does it mean napping more during your workday. It is a choice to be alert, to bring your attention to this moment. Multitasking is a myth that only serves to seize our attention and exhaust us. We chide ourselves as we race from one activity to the next. Yet we do it all in a continuous state of partial attention, imagining we're accomplishing more, when in reality we are living less."

"Do we need to die before we can rest in peace?"

"Rest is found when we are present instead of letting our minds wander aimlessly through the hallways of fear, worry and anxiousness. Rest only comes when we become more by doing less, when we don't allow the urgent to crowd out the important. It is the result of a decluttering of the mind and decoupling from fixed views."

"Idleness is not an indulgence or a vice so much as it is indispensable. Nearly all plants go dormant in winter. Certain mammals hibernate, slowing their metabolisms dramatically. All are guided by inner clocks to emerge again in the fullness of time, when the conditions are right. This period of rest is crucial to their survival."

"Nature's rhythm is medium to slow. Many of us live in the fast lane, out of nature's rhythm. There are two things we can never do in the fast lane : we can neither deepen our experience nor integrate it."

"With mindfulness, we start to see,'Oh, there are these currents moving through my mind, pushing me around. They show up as reactivity, fear, anger, a desire for control, but they are not particular to me. They are moving through all of us, and this is the human condition."

"We realise that these impersonal human conditions predate our births. They are not our fault. I didn't choose to be born into an alcoholic family, but I did have to learn to deal with what happened to me. The critical point here is that while we need to be responsible to the impact these conditions have on our lives, we are not responsible for their appearance. "

"We recognise that while this human condition is always moving through us, we do not have to get caught up in it. We do not have to be swept away by these universal currents. In doing so, we are not escaping from the vicissitudes of life. We are simply finding a natural place of rest."

"Craving, the first poison, is a demand that the objects of our desire provide us with lasting satisfaction so that we feel fulfilled, whole and complete. It is the tendency to cling to someone, something, some idea and become rigidly attached to it. We mistakenly believe our happiness is dependent upon reaching our goal, getting what we want. Even if we do attain our goals, we find that we can get no lasting satisfaction from our accomplishment because everything in life is subject to the law of impermanence.

"Tragically, inherent in demand is the notion that what is here now, what we have now, isn't good enough. We can sense this drive for more; desperately wanting for something to fill up our underlying sense of deficiency."

"The second poison, the defense of aversion, can show up as anger, hatred, loneliness, bullying or fear. We habitually resist, deny and avoid unpleasant feelings, circumstances and people. Defense traps us in a vicious cycle of finding conflict and enemies everywhere. It reinforces our mistaken perceptions that we are separate from everything and everyone."

"The ignorance of distraction is the third poison. It blinds us to the way reality works, giving rise to the tendency to pull and push against life. We lose ourselves, get confused and hold unhelpful views. By ignoring our pain, we continually trip and fall further into suffering."

 "Suffering is the natural consequence of ignoring the truth of life's ever-changing causes and conditions. Our natural inclinations to crave, avoid or distract ourselves won't go away by pretending they don't exist."

"Wisdom cuts through distraction, and clear comprehension replaces delusion. When we use insight to loosen the grip of our self-centeredness, we come to appreciate that all of our actions have consequences. Then we feel compelled to act to reduce the suffering of the world and increase the happiness of all living beings."

"When you're on the surface of your mind, all you can do is react. When you travel into the calm depths, you can act from a place of wisdom and compassion."

"The philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote,' I have often said that the sole cause of man's unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room."

"Trying to rest is not resting; it's just more trying. Effort is necessary in life, yet when we apply this same sort of effort to resting, it backfires. We can only relax the activity that obstructs our contact with rest."

"Desire is almost continuous. It's a fire that is always burning within us, and it ignites and fuels our seeking. Energetically speaking, seeking feels agitated, restless. It implies that I am deficient, disconnected from something essential in my life. I think that something is missing, and that belief perpetuates my seeking.  Trying to get rid of our desires, to stop seeking only leads to more effort in seeking."

"Wholesome desire does not feel agitated. It removes the restlessness because we stop looking outside ourselves for approval or satisfaction. It feels more like love. We love our true nature, we love presence, and because we love it so much, we want to be close to it, to get intimate with it. We long to see the naked truth, unobstructed by preferences or our beliefs."

"One of the qualities of a truly open mind is deep restfulness. We come to this restfulness by accepting and understanding our desires, not by rejecting them. We surrender our strategies and resistance."

"The only choice we have is to be open or closed. Open to what is unfolding or selective in our acceptance of it."

"Awareness of breath is one of the most straightforward and easiest ways to come into the present moment. Placing our warm attention on the breath connects body and mind; the breath calms the body, and the body in turn calms the mind."

"With mindfulness, the mind becomes saturated with sensitivity and a balanced acceptance, opening and receiving the present moment as it is, without clinging or rejecting anything.  We allow our thoughts to wander, troubling feelings may unfold, but for once we are not trying to control, change, approve or reject them."

"The growing stability of mindfulness predisposes us to move beyond superficiality, to penetrate experience and investigate it in order to have a deeper understanding."

"We hear an expert encouraging compassionate action and discouraging negative emotions, and we take that to mean that we should never get angry. That goal is not only unlikely, but also potentially cuts us off from discovering an inner strength we might need to survive difficult events. Pretty soon, we start to reject parts of ourselves in an effort to create a new 'spiritual identity'."

"There is a certain aggression in all this so-called self-improvement. Better to return to the true intention of meditation, which is to let go of the striving, to embrace things as they are, and, with equanimity, to discover freedom."

"I have learned that mindfulness is not about achieving some perfect state or being the best at something. It is about me being authentic, imperfect, vulnerable, and, well, human."

"Meditation is not a cure-all. Even when we practice mindfulness regularly, we can be insightful about certain aspects of our lives and blind to others."

"Your mind didn't become wild when you started to practice meditation. The mindfulness simply made you aware of what had been happening in the background all along - what your personality is reacting to and trying to manage."

"The object of meditation isn't to change ourselves, to throw our the old and bring in the new. It is about making friends with ourselves, meeting each and every part of our lives with curiosity and compassion. This doesn't mean simply that we must tolerate the difficult stuff that comes up in meditation. It means we have to explore it in order to become deeply familiar with our inner world."

"After the ecstasy, the laundry. What this means is that even after a deeply insightful experience, we still have to deal with the nuts and bolts of everyday life."

"We tend to like simple causes of life. We want such accidents to be brought under human control. We want someone to be held accountable. We want the outrageous and impossible to be understood, so as to alleviate our sense of helplessness, but life does not always present itself in ways that are right or reasonable. The truth is, we are rarely in control of such catastrophes."

"There are beings who have the fortitude to stand with suffering that might bring the rest of us to our knees. It's not that such people have no fear. Rather, they are able to maintain a courageous presence while they are afraid. They are open to fear and are willing to hold it, learn from it, and be transformed by it. In this way, fear serves as a catalyst, a doorway to compassion, and a pathway to transformation for all beings who are afraid."

"Living from a place of fear can narrow our vision, shrinking our lives down to what is comfortable and familiar. We easily become consumed with safety precautions and the dread of uncertainty, constantly looking over our shoulders. It is reasonable to want to protect ourselves and those we love. Driven by fear alone, we stop using our common sense and make unwise decisions. We grow less willing to take risks and face conflict or disapproval."

"Either way, compliance to authority or to rebel against, unaddressed fear is a self-imposed exile. The goal is to free ourselves from fear's choke hold by facing fear with courageous presence."

"When we discern the difference between the emotion (fear) and the object (insects, identity theft,rejection,terrorism etc), we can see the part we play in the process. Then we begin to unhook ourselves from the overwhelm."

"One way we express courageous presence is through the mindful practice of touching with mercy and tenderness which we previously touched only with fear."

"Three types of courage are needed to live fully, face death directly and discover true freedom: courage of the warrior, courage of a strong heart, and courage of vulnerability."

"Our common image of warrior courage is related to bravery in emergencies or dangerous situations. There is a shadow to this type of warrior courage, and can be aroused by shame, coercion, a need to control, or a desire to gain approval, leading to a false sense of invulnerability."

"Nevertheless, warrior courage helps us stay steadfast in the face of difficulty, to turn toward suffering, to risk the known for the unknown. It keeps us from being seduced by the habit of complacency."

"Fearlessness is not about eliminating, ignoring or pushing fear away; it is about developing a capacity to be courageously present with our power states of mind and heart even when facing terror."

"Courage of the heart asks us to be undefended. It is the courage to feel, to allow both beauty and horror to touch us. We find this kind of courage when we are lionhearted in our dedication to staying with the truth of our experience, when we don't reject our experience and instead face what is right here,right now."

"The courage of a strong heart activates a fearless receptivity to what is happening, which creates space for us to recognise, explore, and integrate our fear. This type of courage also opens us to a deep compassion for the suffering of all beings. We realise that we all have fears, and we stand with others in their fear."

"Vulnerability is the third type of courage that opens the doorway to the deepest dimensions of our inner nature. Mostly we associate vulnerability with weakness, emotional exposure, and being susceptible to harm. We are therefore terrified of vulnerability and want to avoid it at all costs."

"The courage of vulnerability enables us to sit with a friend whose child died in a car accident, to sense her pain and listen openly without preconceived bias."

"Vulnerability is non-defensiveness. The absence of defense allows us to be wide open to our experience. Less defended, we are less opaque and more transparent. We become sensitive to the ten thousand sorrows and ten thousand joys of our lives. If we are not willing to be vulnerable to pain, loss and sadness, then we'll become insensitive to compassion, joy, love and basic goodness."

"The courage to love requires vulnerability. Is there a more vulnerable state than love? It is full of risk, uncertainty, intensity, intimacy, conflict and truth-telling. Being vulnerable means we are sensitive, impressionable, more receptive to others and to our own inner guidance. We recognise the illusion of control, the reality that suffering is inevitable and we are invited to release our grips and let go into the inexplicable and unpredictable."

"The courage of vulnerability opens the doorway to the invulnerability of our essential nature. This invulnerability is not stoicism or an immunity to the ups and downs of life. In our culture, invulnerability implies a stance against emotion, a false sense of being impenetrable, that this body cannot be hurt or will not die. The vulnerability of our essential nature is a pure openness, and undefended spaciousness in which we step back and allow the winds of fear to blow right through us. There is no place for our fear to stick, no ground on which it can land. We can drop the struggle, relax our unnecessary efforts, and rest in a state of defenselessness. "

"It is possible for us to learn to love our fear. Choosing love over fear speaks to a trust in benevolence, in the basic goodness of reality, in something larger than the fear, but in order  to embrace our fear, we need to feel safe, like a baby being held by her mother in a loving way that the baby feels safe and understood."

"Sometimes, when I sit, I like to imagine that I am my own 'good mother'. I evoke the warm presence of an archetypal mother or grandmother." This is one way to use holding environment to foster trust in our loving attention.

Fifth Invitation : Cultivate don't know mind

"Ignorance is usually though of as the absence of information, being unaware. Sadly, it is more than just not knowing. It means we know something, but it is the wrong thing. Ignorance is misperception."

"Don't know mind represents something else entirely. It is beyond knowing and not knowing." Don't know mind is not limited by agendas, roles and expectations. It is free to discover. When we are filled with knowing, when our minds are made up, it narrows our vision, obscures our ability to see the whole picture, and limits our capacity to act. We also see what our knowing allows us to see. The wise person is both compassionate and humble and knows that she does not know."

"When we enter a situation with don't know mind, we have a pure willingness to do so, without attachment to a particular view or outcome. We don't throw our knowledge away, but we let go of fixed ideas. We let go of control."

"It's confusing to be around people who are confused. Their apparent irrationality and the absence of customary social patterns disturb us. We expect people to make sense."

"We are so strongly identified with our rational-thinking minds that the idea of losing control is frightening to most of us. We are not nearly as concerned about the functioning of our spleens as we are about the ability of our brains to form understandable sentences. 'Anything but that, being demented or unable to think clearly, I would hate that.'It is this aversion to being our of control that leads us to distance ourselves from people who are confused." In our fear, we are the ones who withdraw, even from those we love.

"To understand another's disorientation or confusion, we must start with our own. Feeling how difficult it is to be unable to make contact with another person is an excellent place to begin. What is it like to be lost in the moment, to not know what is happening, to be unable to connect? Meeting this experience with kindness and acceptance enables us to imagine how isolating it can be for those who can't make themselves understood. We can sense the shame of not being able to function 'normally', we can appreciate how we might lash out in anger or resist caregivers' efforts out of desire to regain control of our own lives."

People with Alzheimer's or dementia are often unable to control their own behaviour, even when they are trying as hard as they can. This means that neither you nor they can prevent problems from arising. However, the attitude that you bring to the encounter can impact their behaviour. Their well-being often depends on your well-being."

"When I spend time with people who are living with dementia or Alzheimer's, I make an effort to look past the surface and see the whole individual. I sit without doing, making space to simply be present without the customary busyness or setting of agendas. I strive to meet people with acceptance, listening from the heart, withholding any judgments about their mannerisms or confusion."

"In reality, forgetfulness happens to us all. We don't need to be suffering from dementia or Alzheimer's in order to forget things. We forget more and more details as we move through life. Perhaps that is what scares us so much when confronted with other people's forgetfulness. We recognise that not only our memories, but even our lives will soon be forgotten."

"Our memories are constantly being rewritten. Memory fails. This is part of the process of being alive. It is best to focus not on details of dates or conversations, but that we are loved and capable of loving others."

"Once we realise that we don't recall our memories with any reliable accuracy, then we can free ourselves to tell the stories we need to tell. Sharing our stories is not about nailing down the facts of an event or the exact recall of circumstances. Rather, the point of stories is to take the separated, isolated, broken pieces of our lives and, in the telling of them, produce moments of wholeness."

"When we share stories, we relax our need to interpret life events in a particular way. We open ourselves to don't know mind and allow a deeper part of ourselves to come forward and speak."

"Telling our stories allows us to pull back and see the big picture. We remember things differently and become more aware of certain details, the ones that we might not have noticed before. Often buried in an old story is the strength we need to accept our current situations. Healing requires more than just a change in story line, but the telling of a story can start a process. When we tell our stories, we heal. When someone listens to our stories, we heal."

"Stories are a way we find meaning, but rarely a single meaning. Usually, there are layers of meaning. Maybe things are this way, but maybe they are not. This is where don't know can help us understand ourselves and each other better. When we are not so fixed in our views, stories can take us on a journey past plotlines or event facts to reveal a truth that we may have missed when we were only looking with our ordinary minds. Most real life stories don't have clear beginnings and endings, but they do help us make sense of life and embrace its mystery. Through stories, we knit ourselves together as a family, a community, and a culture, joining ourselves with the larger human story."

"In Zen, the word intimacy is synonymous with awakening, realization or enlightenment. All of those words seem to imply a far-off, special state of mind that somehow transports us to another dimension beyond life's day-to-day problems."

"I prefer the word intimacy because it is an invitation to come closer, to fully embrace and lovingly engage with your life right where you are, rather than trying to move beyond it."

"We've all had moments when we discovered solutions to our problems without needing to figure them out. Intuition is a quality of mind that sense what is needed without relying solely on rational processes."

"When we don't know where we are going, we have to remain fully present, carefully feeling our way inch by inch, moment by moment. We have to stay close to our actual experiences. When we don't know, anything is possible because we are not limited by old habits of thinking of others' points of view. We see the bigger picture. Not knowing leaves room for wisdom to arise, for the situation itself to inform us."

 "The sacred has always existed. Everything is saturated with it. It is the nature of reality. Yet most of the time, we walk around in the sacred world with ordinary vision. We d on't appreciate the full breadth of its beauty. We see in a conditioned way, staying on the surface of life."

"Deep silence is not merely a pause between sounds. It is an inner quietness felt in the heart. This silence strips us of both belief and disbelief. It takes us beyond the known, beyond language, and into the scared."

"Silence is a natural response to the presence of the sacred no matter where it appears. Through silence, we become aware of the majesty in the ordinary; the beauty, the unity, and the depth of the sacred that is always around and within us."

"Death comes to all. Whether we like that fact or not, it is certain to happen. Instead of avoiding this truth, it is useful to understand its meaning. Facing our own mortality can shift our priorities and values, and profoundly change our views of reality. Sometimes adversity is what helps us to discover our strengths, just as dying can help us discover the beauty in life."

"Suffering is suffering. We can't always explain it, let alone control it. But we can meet it with compassion, with presence, look at it directly, understand it and perhaps find meaning in our relationship to it. Meaning isn't about assigning a cause. Meaning has a way of strengthening us; it builds resilience and enables us to confront suffering without running away. Of course, suffering isn't necessary in order for us to find meaning."

"In the process of dying, a gradual awakening occurs. Almost imperceptibly, we begin a long, slow process of letting go, relinquishing what we know we can no longer hold on to or control."

"Letting go is an entry into the unknown territory. Grief is the toll that we pay. Tears are the fluids that ease the release."

"The contemplation of life, death and the inherent mystery in each moment is too important to be left to our final hours. Coming to terms with our fears and discovering what dying has to teach us about life are essential to our transformations. These Five Invitations are a call to that transformation. They can take you to the threshold, but it is up to you to walk on."