Daily Dharma

Practice challenges our conditioned beliefs. And in this challenge, what isn’t true dissolves.

Mental simplicity involves contentment, straightforwardness, and some degree of trust in the unfolding of life. This frees up energy to do the relevant thinking that supports our life of practice. It creates space for the dharma to unfold.

We need to be aware of what we are practicing in any moment. Because whatever we practice, we get better at, whether it’s the skillful or the unskillful.

Here lies one of the greatest gifts of practice—the capacity not to take personally what you’ve always assumed to be yours—in fact, not only what you’ve assumed to be yours but what you’ve assumed to be YOU. Remember, you are not your thoughts or the voice of the inner critic.

Beauty and muck often go hand in hand.

Regret is for your own sake, compassion is for the sake of others.

A Zen master is nothing more than someone who has repeatedly screwed up and eventually learned something. We can do the same.

Buddhists view everything that enters through the sense doors of the body and mind as a form of nutriment. Just as eating junk food can make your physical body sick, so too can seeing, hearing, and thinking certain things make the citta (heart-mind) sick.

Cultivating lovingkindness we become unstoppable in the face of fear. We love our way through the fear.

Like a scared child relaxes and calms down when it is held by a loving parent, our agitated thoughts and emotions become quiet when feeling the security of a caring heart.