What is love? Love is treating your heart with a great deal of tenderness, with understanding, love, and compassion. If you cannot treat your own heart this way, how can you treat your partner with understanding and love?
Letting go gives us freedom, and freedom is the only condition for happiness. If, in our heart, we still cling to anything—anger, anxiety, or possession—we cannot be free.
If, in our heart, we still cling to anything - anger, anxiety, or possessions - we cannot be free.
Happiness is a function of compassion. If you do not have compassion in your heart, you do not have any happiness.
Feelings, whether of compassion or irritation, should be welcomed, recognized, and treated on an absolutely equal basis; because both are ourselves. The tangerine I am eating is me. The mustard greens I am planting are me. I plant with all my heart and mind. Nothing should be treated more carefully than anything else. In mindfulness, compassion, irritation, mustard green plant, and teapot are all sacred.
The most basic condition for happiness is freedom. Here we do not mean political freedom, but freedom from the mental formations of anger, despair, jealousy, and delusion... As long as these poisons are still in our heart, happiness cannot be possible.
May our heart's garden of awakening bloom with hundreds of flowers.