Daily Dharma

When we are our own soulmate, naturally we become a soulmate to other people.

When we can access the wisdom of the deepest feelings within our bodies, we will no longer be able to accept less from life, to make ourselves small in order to live.

People don’t love us for being perfect. Sometimes we forget that the places where we are broken are the places where we shine with gold, where we hold the potential to connect deeply with other beings.

Nirvana is not a static realm beyond this world of movement and interdependence.

The mind is not totally nonexistent, or we wouldn’t be experiencing anything. Yet arriving at the state of not-finding helps us let go of our grasping to our perceived reality and many of our painful, contracted experiences and thought patterns.

We are compelled more by the dreams of things than the things themselves. We crave and cling to mental fabrications. Even the “I” that is seemingly propelled along by this compulsive flow is an endless series of mental constructs.

We don’t renounce evil and practice the precepts to become good but rather to discover the inherent goodness that has always existed within us.

Wisdom, which helps us make reasonably good life choices, enabling us to live reasonably good lives, can’t be secret or esoteric. It must reside in what is common and ordinary; otherwise, what hope would any of us have of living well?

Love, compassion, care—these things can provide many answers to the problems that pop up in our life. You always need to be kind. You always need to be humble. And, most importantly, remember being humble is not being weak.

The Buddha taught that there are four reliances in practice: Rely on the meaning, not the words; on the teachings, not the person; on wisdom, not mere intelligence; on ultimate truth, not conventional truth.