The focusing of attention on the breath is perhaps the most universal of the many hundreds of meditation subjects used worldwide.

Let go of the battle. Breathe quietly and let it be. Let your body relax and your heart soften. Open to whatever you experience without fighting.

When we struggle to change ourselves we, in fact, only continue the patterns of self-judgement and aggression. We keep the war against ourselves alive.

No amount of meditation, yoga, diet, and reflection will make all of our problems go away, but we can transform our difficulties into our practice until little by little they guide us on our way.

To learn to concentrate we must choose a prayer or meditation and follow this path with commitment and steadiness, a willingness to work with our practice day after day, no matter what arises.

Breathing meditation can quiet the mind, open the body, and develop a great power of concentration.

In sitting on the meditation cushion and assuming the meditation posture, we connect ourselves with the present moment in this body and on this earth.

In Buddhist practice, the outward and inward aspects of taking the one seat meet on our meditation cushion.

The purpose of a spiritual discipline is to give us a way to stop the war, not by our force of will, but organically, through understanding an gradual training.

The echo of a red rose
at the sunset, you decided
to check out.

Life begins at the end of your comfort zone.

I sabotage myself for fear of what my bigness could do.

When you say or do anything to please, get, keep, influence, or control anyone or anything, fear is the cause and pain is the result.

There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own.

The possession of power inevitably spoils the free use of reason.

I can’t help thinking about memoir as a down-and-up process: Dive down for color; come up for context. Sink back down for action; climb back up for self-awareness and gratitude.

Yet there comes a time in the life of a patriot when abdication would amount to a betrayal if not outright treachery.

Getting movies made is not as difficult as people think. Making movies is easy. You get a script, you get a director, you raise the money, you make the movie.

All knowledge is good. It is impossible to say any fragment of knowledge, however insignificant or remote from one's ordinary pursuits, may not some day be turned to account.