Openness ultimately means compassion.

The more open you let yourself be, the more you will be able to communicate with friends, with family, with anyone.

Rather than suppressing or trying to avoid your feelings, as much as you can open your heart, your feelings, your whole personality.

Open to your deeper levels of feeling.

You can do this by relaxation, the key to meditation. 

Openness Mind

The real mystery is not somewhere else.

It’s right here in what we call reality, or truth, or daily life.

It’s in confusion and loneliness and boredom, and in the thoughts and concepts, and in all the insects, lizards and fruit trees.

That’s how it manifests, but before it manifests, before conditions, there is a unity, a play of light. 

Gesture of Great Love 

Unfortunately, in America death is a taboo subject.

It would be helpful to us if death were more openly acknowledged as a natural part of being, not as a great tragedy.

By understanding the impermanence of life, we can fully value each moment.

Awareness of death teaches us to enjoy life, not possessively or emotionally, but simply, by being filled with the beauty and creativity of living life.

Openness Mind

The key to natural protection from emotional stress and tension is mindfulness of the breath.

Mindfulness is not forceful control, but an attentive awareness of what is occurring.

When we remain quiet and observe the flow of the breath, the body and mind naturally release the energy stored in tension from its dense and solid forms.

Liberated, this energy increases vitality and clarity, and strengthens our ability to defuse pressures.

Instead of being caught up in a cycle of escalating pressure, we can develop an abiding peace and clarity that grow from within. 

Knowledge of Freedom 

Until we see that self-doubts from our past and old hurts have no place in our lives, our hold on our positive qualities is likely to be tenuous.  

Without realizing what we are doing, we may hold back from giving our best efforts whenever we sense the possibility of criticism or failure.  

It may be very difficult for us to act independently, to base our lives on our own vision and integrity. 

Knowledge of Freedom 

One way to learn compassion is to cultivate the wish to help others.

This simple gesture automatically opens the heart.

We broaden our perspectives and increase our sensitivity to the needs of others, and this then leads us to develop the ability to be of actual help.

Eventually we can learn to love without any ulterior motive or sense of self.

This feeling of selfless love stimulates an openness that allows compassion to arise naturally.

We can the act with skill and compassion in all circumstances.

Openness Mind

Through meditation, we can obtain an understanding of the changing nature of all existence and can then open to a new way of seeing.

Inherent in the realization that our everyday world is actually always changing is the realization of intrinsic awareness.

This awareness permeates all seemingly solid form.

When we begin to open our perspective and develop this awareness, we discover a vast, unexplored world, a place where each moment brings a fresh experience.

It is like learning to swim. When we frantically try to grasp onto something in the water the water hinders us, but when we relax and float the water buoys us up. Our dullness, confusion and restlessness drop away with all other illusions and our experience takes on a new meaning.

When we are able to see our world from the perspective of change, we open to a new freedom and awareness.

Openness Mind

Actually realizing that all experience is transitory, that whatever we seek will elude us, can be very frightening, even threatening.

Change is upsetting, and the idea of constant change is perhaps more disturbing than we care to think about.

We want our world to be at least partially solid and stable, some we can depend upon.

We do not see if any part of our existence were fixed or solid, it would actually pose a great obstacle.

For change is what allows growth and development.

Transitoriness is not a threat at all; it is instead the opening to new horizons.

Openness Mind

Opening the world of thought does not depend on systems or psychologies but on direct experience.

If we can communicate with our own mind, we can open thoughts through thoughts; we can interpret without an interpreter.

The starting point is to see that we are not free and that we are trapped in the field of emotions and thoughts.

The more deeply we understand this, the more easily we can cut through the bonds that restrict us.

The easier this cutting through becomes, the deeper our understanding grows.

Eventually, we can directly touch the meaning of knowledge, finding the source of vitality and abundance and with it, true meaning and value.

This discovery is like coming home.

Tibetan Meditation

Letting go of all thoughts and images, letting them go wherever they will, reveals there is nothing behind, no independent watcher, no teacher observing his pupils at work.

There is no commentator reporting judging behind the thoughts.

In other words, there is no flow of time, no past, present, or future.

Everything is in the moment.

Openness Mind