Chogyam Trungpa
Hope and fear cannot alter the season.Collection: Hope
The bad news is you're falling through the air, nothing to hang on to, no parachute. The good news is, there's no ground.Collection: Inspirational
We must be willing to be completely ordinary people, which means accepting ourselves as we are without trying to become greater, purer, more spiritual, more insightful. If we can accept our imperfections as they are, quite ordinarily, then we can use them as part of the path. But if we try to get rid of our imperfections, then they will be enemies, obstacles on the road to our ‘self-improvement’.Collection: Spiritual
We are always in transition. If you can just relax with that, you'll have no problem.Collection: Relax
To be a spiritual warrior, one must have a broken heart; without a broken heart and the sense of tenderness and vulnerability, your warriorship is untrustworthy.Collection: Spiritual
Real fearlessness is the product of tenderness. It comes from letting the world tickle your heart, your raw and beautiful heart. You are willing to open up, without resistance or shyness, and face the world. You are willing to share your heart with others.Collection: Beautiful
My advice to you is not to undertake the spiritual path. It is too difficult, too long, and is too demanding. I suggest you ask for your money back, and go home. This is not a picnic. It is really going to ask everything of you. So, it is best not to begin. However, if you do begin, it is best to finish.Collection: Spiritual
Ultimately, that is the definition of bravery: not being afraid of yourself.Collection: Bravery
If kindness doesn't work, try more kindness.Collection: Kindness
We cannot change the way the world is, but by opening ourselves to the world as it is, we may find that gentleness, decency and bravery are available - not only to us, but to all human beings.Collection: Bravery
Meditation practice is a way of making friends with ourselves. Whether we are worthy or unworthy, that's not the point. It's developing a friendly attitude to ourselves, accepting the hidden neurosis coming through.Collection: Attitude
Although the warrior's life is dedicated to helping others, he realizes that he will never be able to completely share his experience with others...Yet he is more and more in love with the world. That combination of love affair and loneliness is what enables the warrior to constantly reach out to help others. By renouncing his private world, the warrior discovers a greater universe and a fuller and fuller broken heart. This is not something to feel bad about; it is a cause for rejoicing.Collection: Loneliness
We are caught in a traffic jam of discursive thought.Collection: Objectivity
Mindfulness does not mean pushing oneself toward something or hanging on to something. It means allowing oneself to be there in the very moment of what is happening in the living process - and then letting go.Collection: Letting Go
The point is not to convert anyone to our view, but rather to help people wake to their own view, their own sanity.Collection: Views
Sit and do nothing. Every once in a while a golden fish swims by and lays her golden eggs. You'll know.Collection: Eggs
You must personally accept the responsibility of improving your own life.Collection: Responsibility
Meditation should not be regarded as a learning process. It should be regarded as an experiencing process. You should not try to learn from meditation but try to feel it. Meditation is an act of nonduality. The technique you are using should not be separate from you; it is you, you are the technique. Meditator and meditation are one. There is no relationship involved.Collection: Practice
Opening to oneself fully is opening to the world.Collection: World
To be a warrior is to learn to be genuine in every moment of your life.Collection: Life
It's no use trying to be different than you are.Collection: Trying
If you are telling the truth, then you can speak gently, and your words will have power.Collection: Truth
We have a fear of facing ourselves. That is the obstacle. Experiencing the innermost core of our existence is very embarrassing to a lot of people. A lot of people turn to something that they hope will liberate them without their having to face themselves. That is impossible. We can't do that. We have to be honest with ourselves. We have to see our gut, our excrement, our most undesirable parts. We have to see them. That is the foundation of warriorship, basically speaking. Whatever is there, we have to face it, we have to look at it, study it, work with it and practice meditation with it.Collection: Fear
When human beings lose their connection to nature, to heaven and earth, then they do not know how to nurture their environmect or how to rule their world - which is saying the same thing. Human beings destroy their ecology at the same time that they destroy one another. From that perspective, healing our society goes hand in hand with healing our personal, elemental connection with the phenomenal world.Collection: Healing
Take a friendly attitude toward your thoughts.Collection: Attitude
In the cocoon, there is no idea of light at all, until we experience some longing for openness, some longing for something other than the smell of our own sweat. When we examine that comfortable darkness - look at it, smell it, feel it - we find it is claustrophobic.Collection: Change
Magic is the power within oneself. You have enough strength and exertion and energy to view things as they are, personally, properly, and directly. You have the chance to experience the brightness of life and the haziness of life, which is also a source of power. The fantastically sharp-edged quality of life can be experienced personally and directly. There is a powerful sense of perception available to you.Collection: Powerful
As long as we relate with our underlying primordial intelligence and as long as we push ourselves a little, by jumping into the middle of situations, then intelligence arises automatically.Collection: Jumping
The attainment of enlightenment from ego's point of view is extreme death.Collection: Views
The essence of warriorship, or the essence of human bravery, is refusing to give up on anyone or anything. We can never say that we are simply falling to pieces or that anyone else is, and we can never say that about the world either. Within our lifetime there will be great problems in the world, but let us make sure than within our lifetime do disasters happen. We can prevent them. It is up to us.Collection: Giving Up
The strongest of us are those that are spiritually strong, and a spiritual warrior is one of vulnerability.Collection: Spiritual
When we hide from the world in this way, we feel secure. We may think we have quieted our fear, but we are actually making ourselves numb with fear. We surround ourselves with our own familiar thoughts, so that nothing sharp or painful can touch us.Collection: Change
What the warrior renounces is anything in his experience that is a barrier between himself and others. In other words, renunciation is making yourself more available, more gentle and open to others.Collection: Buddhist
A genuine sense of humor is having a light touch: not beating reality into the ground but appreciating reality with a light touch. The basis of Shambhala vision is rediscovering that perfect and real sense of humor, that light touch of appreciation.Collection: Appreciation
There is something suspect about our inability to enjoy anything.Collection: Inability
Sanity is permanent, neurosis is temporary.Collection: Neurosis
The practice of meditation is a way of continuing one's confusion, chaos, aggression, and passion—but working with it, seeing it from the enlightened point of view.Collection: Passion
When you have a brilliant sun, which is a source of vision, the light from the sun shines through every window of the house, and the brightness of its light inspires you to open all the curtains. In the vision of the Great Eastern Sun, no human being is a lost cause.Collection: Light
We could say that compassion is the ultimate attitude of wealth: an anti-poverty attitude, a war on want. It contains all sorts of heroic, juicy, positive, visionary, expansive qualities. And it implies larger scale thinking, a freer and more expansive way of relating to yourself and the world.Collection: Attitude
Generosity is self-existing openness, complete openness. You are no longer subject to cultivating your own scheme or project. And the best way to open yourself up is to make friends with yourself and with others.Collection: Self
The sun has a sense of all-pervasive brilliance, which does not discriminate in the slightest. It is the goodness that exists in a situation, in oneself, and in one's world, which is expressed without doubt, hesitation, or regret. The sun principle also includes the notion of blessings descending upon us and creating sacred world. It also represents clarity, without doubt.Collection: Regret
The way of cowardice is to embed ourselves in a cocoon, in which we perpetuate our habitual patterns. When we are constantly recreating our basic patterns of habits and thought, we never have to leap into fresh air or onto fresh ground.Collection: Buddhist
If we go somewhere on foot, we know the way perfectly, whereas if we go by car or airplane, we are hardly there at all. It becomes merely a dream.Collection: Dream
You don't know how to take off your suit of armor. You have no idea how to conduct yourself without the reference point of your own security... You can expose your wounds and flesh, your sore points. You can be completely raw and exposed.Collection: Ideas
Disappointment results from the removal of illusion.Collection: Disappointment
This whole world is mind's world, the product of the mind.Collection: Mind
As long as a person is involved with warfare, trying to defend or attack, then his action is not sacred; it is mundane, dualistic, a battlefield situation.Collection: Long
We should see money in terms of the expenditure of energy and how we are going to transmute that energy into a proper use.Collection: Energy