“Contemplating impermanence can be a liberating experience, one that brings both sobriety and joy. In essence, we become less attached. We realize we can’t really have anything. We have money and then it’s gone; we have sadness and then it’s gone. No matter how we want to cling to our loved ones, by nature every relationship is a meeting and parting. This doesn’t mean we have less love. It means we have less fixation, less pain. It means we have more freedom and appreciation, because we can relax into the ebb and flow of life.” ~ Sakyong Mipham, Turning the Mind Into An Ally (Page 150)
“Meaning is not something you stumble across, like the answer to a riddle or the prize in a treasure hunt. Meaning is something you build into your life. You build it out of your own past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experience of humankind as it is passed on to you, out of your own talent and understanding, out of the things you believe in, out of the things and people you love, out of the values for which you are willing to sacrifice something. The ingredients are there. You are the only one who can put them together into that unique pattern that will be your life. Let it be a life that has dignity and meaning for you. If it does, then the particular balance of success or failure is of less account.” ~ John Gardner, James Clear Blog
“Impermanence is always pounding at the door. Of course, acknowledging impermanence doesn’t mean we get permanence. It means we’re more in tune with reality; we can relax. As we relinquish our attachment to permanence, pain begins to diminish because we’re no longer fooled. Accepting impermanence means that we spend less energy resisting reality. Our suffering has a more direct quality. We’re no longer trying to avoid it. We see that impermanence is a river that runs through life, not a rock that stands in the way. We see that because we resist impermanence, pain and suffering are constants. We realize that pain comes from our desire for permanence.” ~ Sakyong Mipham, Turning the Mind Into An Ally (Page 147)
“When we’re in any kind of pain, we can use it to open our hearts to the reality that people are always suffering. Pain is something everyone experiences. We can use it to ground us in the fundamental truth of our being. Pain gives us firsthand experience by which to be kind and generous to others. It gives us direct access through our empathy to helping others. We can use pain to activate compassion. We’d like others not to experience pain, and we can extend ourselves to them. We can contemplate the words, ‘May all beings be free of pain.’ Our direct experience of pain only makes our wish more potent. It may even decrease our pain, because it increases our joy. This becomes a wonderful meditation, to sit there and contemplate the relief of pain and suffering of everyone, of the whole world—not only because it changes our attitude toward our own pain, but also because it’s opening our mind of enlightenment. This kind of prayer is always healing.” ~ Sakyong Mipham, Turning the Mind Into An Ally (Page 144)
“We’ve been born in a time and place where we have the luxury of hearing, contemplating, and putting into action teachings that awaken us to our enlightened mind. We’re relatively healthy, we have a roof over our head and food in our mouths. We have family and friends. We’ve encountered someone who can teach us how to train our mind and open our heart. Being threatened by nuclear war, terrorism, and global warming is a reminder that we can’t take such conditions for granted. We’re just these tiny vulnerable beings riding on a blue dot in space. Yet sometimes we act as if we’re the center of the universe. The enlightened alternative is to appreciate how incredibly rare and precious human life is. The enlightened alternative is to appreciate everything. By appreciating whatever we encounter, we can use it to further our journey of warriorship. We are good as we are, and it is good as it is. Once we have this understanding, we’ll see that we are living in a sacred world.” ~ Sakyong Mipham, Turning the Mind Into An Ally (Page 143)
“We can say ‘blue,’ but until we see the color blue, we don’t really know what the meaning is. We can say that something is hot, but until we touch it, we don’t know what ‘hot’ means. We can talk about bringing our mind to compassion by saying ‘May all sentient beings be free from suffering and the root of suffering,’ but until we feel the pain of others, ‘pain’ is only a word. We have to crack its shell to let its meaning infuse us, seep into our lives.” ~ Sakyong Mipham, Turning the Mind Into An Ally (Page 133)
“I’ve said before that our bewildered mind is like a wild horse. I have a very high regard for horses. When I was in high school, I spent some time working on a ranch in West Texas. A stallion in the distance on the high plains is a powerful sight to behold. We don’t tame such a strong majestic creature by beating the spirit out of it. Instead, we work with its raw power and turn that energy in a certain direction. Where do we want to take that horse? Where do we want to go riding? We want to make a real journey. We want to ride in the meadows of compassion, the gardens of awakened heart, the fields of wisdom. This is the essence of the practice of contemplation: we learn to direct the energy of our mind toward enlightenment.” ~ Sakyong Mipham, Turning the Mind Into An Ally (Page 132)
“The point of awareness—and the point of meditation, for that matter—is to know what’s happening. We have to be awake. Otherwise we fall into lethargy, which is one step away from sleep. Without awareness, meditation will lead nowhere. In the first stages of peaceful abiding, awareness acts as a spy who watches us meditate, alerting mindfulness to bring us back to the breath when we stray. For a while it might be clumsy and intrusive, because as beginners we need to be watching constantly. But as we practice, awareness continues to develop. The mind becomes more stable, and our ability to know what’s happening becomes stronger. Awareness becomes the sheriff who can sense that our mind is about to become distracted and remedy the situation before it even occurs. We don’t see the sheriff running around everywhere; we just know he’s there. Because we have more confidence, awareness no longer feels intrusive.” ~ Sakyong Mipham, Turning the Mind Into An Ally (Page 107)
“Life is more difficult if you worry. It’s better to deal with things as they come up.” ~ Penor Rinpoche, via Turning the Mind Into An Ally (Page 101)
“We have to accept responsibility for the state of our own mind; it doesn’t work to blame others for our confusion or expect them to encourage or confirm us in our practice. We have to look to ourselves as the source of our own confusion—and our own enlightenment.” ~ Sakyong Mipham, Turning the Mind Into An Ally (Page 98)
“Obviously, meditation can sometimes be difficult. We may want to run away from practice, run from the cushion, even run from the word ‘meditation.’ We can run as far as we like, but what we’ll discover is that there is no better environment than meditation in which to build the stability, clarity, and strength of our mind. At the same time, the difficulty of making it to the cushion, the difficulty of staying with the technique, the difficulty of abandoning discursiveness, isn’t going to disappear. In procrastinating, we’re avoiding the one thing that really is going to make a difference in our lives. Meditation stabilizes us in our inherent power as humans. It introduces the possibility of living our lives in a continually conscious, confident, and balanced state of mind.” ~ Sakyong Mipham, Turning the Mind Into An Ally (Page 91)
“Like weeding a garden, dealing with obstacles is an ongoing aspect of meditation. Working with these challenges on the cushion is another way we build confidence and courage to go further. We can be grateful for obstacles, because they push us forward in our practice. After a while it is even possible to feel a spark of delight when we see an obstacle coming up, because we know it’s an opportunity to keep sharpening our minds. The more obstacles we face, the more confidence we feel to deal with them.” ~ Sakyong Mipham, Turning the Mind Into An Ally (Page 86)
“From a Buddhist point of view, human beings aren’t intrinsically aggressive; we are inherently peaceful. This is sometimes hard to believe. When we’re angry or upset, our untrained mind becomes belligerent and we routinely strike out at others. We imagine that reacting aggressively to the object of our emotion will resolve our pain. Throughout history we have used this approach over and over again. Striking out when we’re in pain is clearly one way we perpetuate misery. With a trained mind, a stable mind, a mind with a larger motivation than its own comfort, we find another way to work with difficulties of daily life. When we’re in a difficult situation, we maintain our seat. Instead of perpetuating misery by acting out aggression, we learn to use the rough spots to spark the courage to proceed on our journey. Eventually we may actually be able to turn the mind of anger into the energy of love and compassion.” ~ Sakyong Mipham, Turning the Mind Into An Ally (Page 26)
“It’s fine to take pleasure, to enjoy good food, and to listen to beautiful music. Becoming curious about how we suffer doesn’t mean that we can no longer enjoy eating ice cream. But once we begin to understand the bewilderment of our untrained mind, we won’t look to the ice cream and say, ‘That’s happiness.’ We’ll realize that the mind can be happy devoid of ice cream. We’ll realize that the mind is content and happy by nature.” ~ Sakyong Mipham, Turning the Mind Into An Ally (Page 23)
“Suffering is the state of mind that regards itself as real. We can spend our whole life trying to create a solid, lasting self. We can spend our whole life looking outside ourselves for something to reflect this delusion of solidity, to be as real and lasting as we wish ourselves to be. Search though we will, it’s impossible to find what doesn’t exist, and the perpetual search causes suffering.” ~ Sakyong Mipham, Turning the Mind Into An Ally (Page 14)
“True happiness is always available to us, but first we have to create the environment for it to flourish.” ~ Sakyong Mipham, Turning the Mind Into An Ally (Page 6)
“If we want to undo our own bewilderment and suffering and be of benefit to others and the planet, we’re going to have to be responsible for learning what our own mind is and how it works, no matter what beliefs we hold. Once we see how our mind works, we see how our life works, too. That changes us.” ~ Sakyong Mipham, Turning the Mind Into An Ally (Page 5)
“True salvation is fulfillment, peace, life in all its fullness. It is to be who you are, to feel within you the good that has no opposite, the joy of Being that depends on nothing outside itself. It is felt not as a passing experience but as an abiding presence. In theistic language, it is to ‘know God’ — not as something outside you but as your own innermost essence. True salvation is to know yourself as an inseparable part of the timeless and formless One Life from which all that exists derives its being.” ~ Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now (Page 146)
“Most human relationships consist mainly of minds interacting with each other, not of human beings communicating, being in communion. No relationship can thrive in that way, and that is why there is so much conflict in relationships. When the mind is running your life, conflict, strife, and problems are inevitable. Being in touch with your inner body creates a clear space of no-mind within which the relationship can flower.” ~ Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now (Page 127)
“Your life’s journey has an outer purpose and an inner purpose. The outer purpose is to arrive at your goal or destination, to accomplish what you set out to do, to achieve this or that, which, of course, implies future. But if your destination, or the steps you are going to take in the future, take up so much of your attention that they become more important to you than the step you are taking now, then you completely miss the journey’s inner purpose, which has nothing to do with where you are going or what you are doing, but everything to do with how. It has nothing to do with future but everything to do with the quality of your consciousness at this moment.” ~ Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now (Page 88)