I May Be Wrong

From now on, one of your guiding principles will be to become someone whose company you have a slightly easier time enduring.

Knowledge is proud of all it knows. Wisdom is humble before all it doesn’t know.

It filled me with awe that this encounter with my own helplessness was the key that once more opened the door to joy.

I’ve done nothing unforgivable, nothing I deeply regret or haven’t been able to put right.

Having an actual date was obviously very strange. Never had time felt more limited.

It has become more important than ever to live right here right now in every moment, instead of getting lost in thoughts about what things should be like or what might be.

Choosing where to direct your attention may sound easy, but I’ll be the first to admit how extremely difficult it can be.

What I value most from my seventeen years of full-time spiritual training is that I no longer believe my every thought. That’s my superpower.

It was as though the world was whispering: ‘Welcome home.’ For the first time, I felt completely at home on this planet.

Success and happiness are two different things. To others, it must have seemed I’d played my cards right. I had all the trappings of material and professional success. But I’d done it with sheer willpower and self-discipline.

Thoughts are not a problem in and of themselves, of course. But automatically, uncritically identifying with every passing thought – that’s a huge problem.

Ever since I was little, I’d had a voice inside me whispering I wasn’t good enough.

Don’t believe your every thought.

Practicing letting go is one of the most important things I’ve learned.

I may be wrong. So simple. So True. So easy to forget.

Our psychological suffering is for the most part not caused by external events but, rather, by what’s happening inside us – the thoughts bubbling up that we can either believe or not.

Chaos may rattle you, but order can kill you.

Thoughts with the word ‘should’ in them make me small, dull and lonely.

Most of us like helping others. When a straightforward opportunity to do so arises, we don’t mind at all.

I’m not afraid of death, I just don’t feel ready to stop living.

The universe makes no mistakes.

The world is not as it is. The world is as you are.

Reconciling ourselves to what has happened isn’t mainly about being the bigger person. It’s about protecting our own mental wellbeing.

Choosing where to direct your attention may sound easy, but I’ll be the first to admit how extremely difficult it can be. When we first start to try to focus on our breathing, most of our minds behave like frantic yo-yos.

A lot of people in our part of the world live with the continual grumblings of a harsh inner critic... We often carry around a feeling of not measuring up, a fear of being ‘found out’.

We just have to understand that these are thoughts – not truths.

Directing our attention, choosing what we aim it at, is the best and possibly the only thing we can do when things get really hard.

Only dead people have quiet minds. For as long as we’re alive, we’re in possession of an intellect, and the nature of the human intellect is to generate ideas, compare those ideas with others, reformulate them, question them.

When we believe everything we think, it leaves us vulnerable and defenceless. On every level. And it erodes our wisdom.

It’s so easy to forget that reason isn’t the only tool in our toolbox.

We all have access to the intelligence of the moment. There’s a finely honed, quiet compass inside each of us.

If you want someone to be easy to deal with, to behave in a way you find tolerable, there’s really only one way: learn to like them exactly as they are.

Rituals and ceremonies have no intrinsic meaning. We endow them with meaning.

If we always cling to what we think we already know, how will we ever discover anything new?

The structured yet simple life in the monastery, with its emphasis on routine and minimal possessions, provided a restful and focused environment.

The only way to get rid of thoughts that are harming us... is to let them go. Even if they’re ‘right’.

Imagine what the world could look like if most people, for the most part, remembered that they might be wrong.

Being right is never the point.