We can transmute negative feelings into positive, balanced feelings.
This does not mean just trying to be happy, because happiness is not necessarily balanced.
The feeling of balance is something quite different.
Footsteps on the Diamond Path Volume I-III
When laziness, weakness, excuses, or rationalizations are constantly repeated within the mind, they generate a kind of callousness or frigidity and a feeling of avoiding something ‘terrible’.
What are you avoiding is not terrible.
Even fear can be used to awaken, recognize, change and relieve the tension.
But you must do something yourself and not expect someone else to do it for you.
Ask yourself, how much are you learning from this experience?
How much can others help you?
It is absolutely essential that you risk taking responsibility for yourself.
You need to grow and develop for your own sake, so you must deal directly with yourself.
Crystal Mirror IV
Once we clearly recognize that our expectations lead only to disappointment and frustration, constant grasping no longer binds us, and we become more open to our experiences.
We can find satisfaction anywhere—a simple walk may give more pleasure than any other entertainment.
But until we open our hearts, there is little inspiration, inner light, or warmth to sustain us, for we constantly undermine ourselves.
Ultimately no one can really help us unless we take the first step, listen to ourselves, encourage ourselves, and give ourselves confidence by taking refuge in our hearts.
Once our hearts are open, all existence appears naturally beautiful and harmonious.
This is not just another fantasy—it is possible to see and feel this way, and this is the essence of the spiritual teachings.
The heart reveals all knowledge to us.
Why the heart and not the mind?
Because our egos control our heads, and our hearts are much more free.
Tibetan Meditation
Every single thought has a nucleus of energy, a center of power and awareness that we can easily find once we put aside the ideas of doing and achieving.
The energy in the center just opens.
This is being.
Being needs no improvements; it needs no doing or moving. Being is not past, not future, not even present.
Tibetan Mediation
Merit is not an easy concept for Westerners to understand.
In one way, however, it is simple.
When you act with compassion, free from anger, that is merit.
When you make a gift freely, or cultivate peace within yourself, or for others, that is merit.
When you care for another; showing your love, helping them heal, that is merit.
When you devote your efforts to transforming the suffering of the world, the pollution of the planet, and the inner toxicity that plagues us all, you are manifesting the power of merit.
Whatever you do out of goodness is a manifestation of merit.
Challenging Journey, Creative Journey
The point is to appreciate each moment as fully as possible—whatever comes.
This does not mean that we forget the future, but it does mean that the goal, the fruit, is already here.
We could spend our whole lives slowly starving to death, selling the present for the future and getting nothing nourishing in return.
But we can also do it differently.
Through a refined searching and inquiry, through watching our own minds, we can learn great lessons.
The silent space between thoughts is always available. The unborn is always there, and ‘there’ is not a place.
Footsteps on the Diamond Path
How present are you to your own experience?
It’s a reasonable question to ask.
If the way you see the world is based on labels mind assigns, does that mean that labels come between you and experience, and you are not really present at all?
Gesture of Great Love
Whatever you feel while meditating, let it be.
You do not need to change anything or push anything away.
Rest in a state where there are no instructions, nothing to do.
Whatever is happening does not belong to you, so you do not need to hold on to it or name it.
Stay open and you will be kissed by space.
Gesture of Great Love
Is it not possible for us to look within and appreciate ourselves, rather than continuing to look outside ourselves for fulfillment?
When we find inspiration, openness, and balance within, then our lives become genuinely happy and worthwhile—we can find happiness even in our work.
Instead of wasting our energy and human potential in useless thoughts and actions, we begin to act constructively, for the basis of the spiritual path is the development in ourselves of what is truly balanced, natural, and meaningful.
Gesture of Balance
Sustaining our faith and trust is one of the most important parts of developing a spiritual life.
Anyone can sustain an interest for a short period of time or even for a year or two, but the more complex and conflicting the world becomes, the more difficult it is to survive spiritually—to survive internally—because everything seems to lure us away from meditation and inner calm, from our sense of inner strength and wisdom.
Tibetan Meditation