Smiling at someone can have significant health consequences.

Seeking happiness is not the problem. The problem is that we often do not know where and how to find genuine happiness and so make the mistakes that cause suffering for ourselves & others.

When you recognize and reflect on even one good thing about yourself, you are building a bridge to a place of kindness and caring.

Never feel ashamed of your longing for happiness.

Clinging to our ideas of perfection isolates us from life and is a barrier.

Sometimes people in abusive situations think they’re responsible for the other person’s happiness or that they’re going to fix them and make them feel better. The practice of equanimity teaches that it’s not all up to you to make someone else happy.

Even as we recognize our resentment, bitterness, or jealousy, we can also honor our own wish to be happy, to feel free.

The more we identify and acknowledge moments when we’re unable to share in someone else’s pleasure and ask ourselves whether another person’s happiness truly jeopardizes our own, the more we pave the way for experiencing sympathetic joy

The more we practice sympathetic joy, the more we come to realize that the happiness we share with others is inseparable from our own happiness.

It is awareness of both our shared pain and our longing for happiness that links us to other people and helps us to turn toward them with compassion.

Cultivation of positive emotions, including self-love and self-respect, strengthens our inner resources and opens us to a broader range of thoughts and actions.

Genuine awe connects us with the world in a new way.

The costs of keeping secrets include our growing isolation due to fear of detection and the ways we shut down inside to avoid feeling the effects of our behavior. We can never afford to be truly seen and known—even by ourselves.

A key barometer to help us weigh the rightness of our actions is self-respect.

The wholesome pursuit of excellence feels quite different from perfectionism.

We nurture our sense of connection with the larger whole, noticing that the whole is only as healthy as its smallest part.

You don't have to love yourself unconditionally before you can give or receive real love.

Feelings of apathy as they relate to our relationships often stem from insufficiently paying attention to those around us.

Only when we start to distinguish reality from fantasy that we can humbly, with eyes wide open, forge loving and sustainable connections with others.

One foundation of loving relationships is curiosity, keeping open to the idea that we have much to learn even about those we have been close to for decades.

Be open to the possibility that there are other paths available to you in relating to yourself and to another.

Without equanimity, we might give love to others only in an effort to bridge the inevitable and healthy space that always exists between two people.

Whether we fear the existence of boundaries with others or crave more of them, there’s no denying that individuation and separation are inevitable parts of loving relationships that become the site of tension.

How we traverse the space between us when conflict arises has a profound effect on the health and longevity of our relationships.

The paradigm for our relationships is formed from our earliest experiences and is actually hardwired into our neurological and emotional network.

Letting go of the belief that we’re powerless to help relieve our own suffering enhances our ability not only to heal but also to genuinely love and receive the love of others.

We learn from conflicts only when we are willing to do so.

Love is a living capacity within us that is always present, even when we don’t sense it.

Sanskrit has different words to describe love for a brother or sister, love for a teacher, love for a partner, love for one’s friends, love of nature, and so on. English has only one word, which leads to never-ending confusion.

When our focus is on seeking, perfecting, or clinging to romance, the charge is often generated by instability, rather than by an authentic connection with another person.

Real Love may run on a lower voltage, but it’s also more grounded & sustainable.

From our first breath to our last, we’re presented again and again with the opportunity to experience deep, lasting, and trans-formative connection with other beings: to love them and be loved by them; to show them our true natures and to recognize theirs.

Buddhist teachings discourage us from clinging and grasping to those we hold dear, and from trying to control the people or the relationship. What’s more, we’re encouraged to accept the impermanence of all things: the flower that blooms today will be gone tomorrow, the objects we possess will break or fade or lose their utility, our relationships will change, life will end.

Whatever language we use use to describe healthy relationships, when we’re in them, we feel nourished by them, in body as well as mind.

Though it may seem counter intuitive to our inner perfectionist, recognizing our mistakes as valuable lessons (not failures) helps us lay the groundwork for later success.

Science tells us that love not only diminishes the experience of physical pain but can make us—and our beloveds—healthier.

Love seems to open and expand us right down to the cellular level, while fear causes us to contract and withdraw into ourselves.

There are an incalculable—even infinite—number of situations in which we can practice forgiveness. Expecting it to be a singular action—motivated by the sheer imperative to move on and forget—can be more damaging than the original feelings of anger. Accepting forgiveness as pluralistic and as an ongoing, individualized process opens us up to realize the role that our own needs play in conflict resolution.

Wake up to realities! Real life is all about real things!

Forgiveness is a personal process that doesn’t depend on us having direct contact with the people who have hurt us.

Healing comes in many ways, and no one formula fits all.

Our can-do culture has made many of us believe that we should always be self-sufficient. Somewhere along the way, we also got the message that asking for help is a sign of weakness. We often forget that we’re interdependent creatures whose very existence depends on the kindness of others, including—with a bow to Tennessee Williams—strangers.

In more ways than any of us can name, love is wrapped up with the idea of expectation.

The heart is a generous muscle.

These are times when sympathetic joy comes naturally, but in a complex relationship the heart may not leap up so easily.

Laughing at your pettiness probably works better than scolding yourself for it.

By experimenting with sympathetic joy, we break from the constricted world of individual struggle and see that joy exists in more places than we have yet imagined.

To celebrate someone else’s life, we need to find a way to look at it straight on, not from above with judgment or from below with envy.

There is no conflict between loving others deeply and living mindfully.

Even when we do our very best to treat those close to us with utmost respect and understanding, conflict happens. That’s life. That’s human nature.

No connection is always easy or free of strife, no matter how many minutes a day we meditate. It’s how we relate to conflict, as well as to our differing needs and expectations, that makes our relationships sustainable.

Love is defined by difficult acts of human compassion & generosity.

As we explore new ways of loving and being loved by others, we need to equip ourselves with open, pliant minds; we need to be willing to investigate, experiment, and evaluate as we approach a topic we thought we knew so much about.

Love simply, perpetually exists and that it’s a matter of psychic housekeeping to make room for it.

Everyone we interact with has the capacity to surprise us in an infinite number of ways. What can first open us up to each of our innate capacities for love is merely to recognize that.

When we identify the thoughts that keep us from seeing others as they truly are we prepare the ground for real love.

It's tough to have an authentic relationship with awe in the age of awesome, a word that has become so overused as to be drained of its meaning.

What happens in our hearts is our field of freedom. As long as we carry old wounds and anger in our hearts, we continue to suffer. Forgiveness allows us to move on.

Though it may sound paradoxical, identifying our thoughts, emotions, and habitual patterns of behavior is the key to freedom & transformation.

No matter what we think we should do, I don’t think you can coerce yourself into loving your neighbor—or your boss—when you can’t stand him. But if you try to understand your feelings of dislike with mindfulness and compassion, being sure not to forget self-compassion, you create the possibility for change.

Dear men, I’ll make it clear to you. Those who tell you that ‘true love’ is never giving up someone you are in love with are insecure and competitive. Their description on love is based on their needs. Selfish needs. While women who are confident, their spirits fulfilled by themselves know that a 'good bye’ doesn’t mean they never loved you. They realizes that letting you go is what God needs them to do, because both happiness: yours and your lover require taking different journey for spiritual growth. These kind of women show you what 'real love’ is. And you don’t want to catch them still? Win a battle for them? Even after what you have learnt? For God’s sake, these women have endured much. For battles she fight alone, they deserve LOVE.

In order to free ourselves from our assumptions about love, we must ask ourselves what long-held, often buried assumptions are and then face them, which takes courage, humility, and kindness.

In reality, love is fluid; it’s a verb, not a noun.

The good news is that opportunities for love enter our lives unpredictably, whether or not we’ve perfected self-compassion or befriended our inner critic.

When we learn to respond to disappointments with acceptance, we give ourselves the space to realize that all our experiences—good and bad alike—are opportunities to learn and grow.

Loving ourselves calls us to give up the illusion that we can control everything and focuses us on building our inner resource of resilience.

Asking questions is an opportunity for creativity and personal expression, both for the person asking and the person answering.

We must not just be recipients but givers! We must not just be keepers but donors! Giving brings relief and sharing enlightens the heart. Caring joins and showing love is life. It is never enough to acquire all acquisition. It is never enough to have all our ambitions. We must endeavor to give for giving out of a true heart is a true love and a true love is life.

There’s no denying that it takes effort to set the intention to see our fundamental connected-ness with others.

Any time we find ourselves relying on the ideas of an absolute, frozen state of right and wrong—or fairness versus unfairness—that we are used to, we can compare the habit to distraction during meditation.

If we truly loved ourselves, we’d never harm another. That is a truly revolutionary, celebratory mode of self-care.

The more we practice mindfulness, the more alert we become to the cost of keeping secrets.

We’re capable of much more than mediocrity, much more than merely getting by in this world.

As human beings, we’re capable of greatness of spirit, an ability to go beyond the circumstances we find ourselves in, to experience a vast sense of connection to all of life.

Our minds tend to race ahead into the future or replay the past, but our bodies are always in the present moment.

The skills available to us through mindfulness make it possible to bring love to our connections with others.

What we learn in meditation, we can apply to all other realms of our lives.

Keeping secrets is a consequential act for all involved.

The environment we create can help heal us or fracture us. This is true not just for buildings and landscapes but also for interactions and relationships.

So often, fear keeps us from being able to say yes to love—perhaps our greatest challenge as human beings.

Learning to treat ourselves lovingly may at first feel like a dangerous experiment.

By accepting and learning to embrace the inevitable sorrows of life, we realize that we can experience a more enduring sense of happiness.

The journey to loving ourselves doesn’t mean we like everything.

When we direct a lot of hostile energy toward the inner critic, we enter into a losing battle.

When we approach the journey acknowledging what we do not know and what we can’t control, we maintain our energy for the quest.

When we relate to ourselves with loving kindness, perfectionism naturally drops away.

Wholehearted acceptance is a basic element of love, starting with love for ourselves, and a gateway to joy. Through the practices of loving kindness and self-compassion, we can learn to love our flawed and imperfect selves. And in those moments of vulnerability, we open our hearts to connect with each other, as well. We are not perfect, but we are enough.

When we contemplate the miracle of embodied life, we begin to partner with our bodies in a kinder way.

Wherever the responsibility lies, shame creates a solid and terrible feeling of unworthiness that resides in our bodies: the storehouse of the memories of our acts, real or imagined, and the secrets we keep about them.

The heart contracts when our bodies are overcome by shame.

Shame weakens us. It can make us frightened to take on something new. We start to withdraw from whatever might give us pleasure, self-esteem, or a sense of our value.

To imagine the way we think is the singular causative agent of all we go through is to practice cruelty toward ourselves.

It’s affirming that we can look at any experience from the fullness of our being and get past the shame we carry.

Mindfulness allows us to shift the angle on our story and to remember that we have the capacity to learn and change in ways that are productive, not self-defeating.

We can use meditation as a way to experiment with new ways of relating to ourselves, even our uncomfortable thoughts.

if we really look at our actions with eyes of love, we see that our lives can be more straightforward, simpler, less sculpted by regret and fear, more in alignment with our deepest values.

Paying attention to the ethical implications of our choices has never been more pressing—or more complicated—than it is today.

Causing harm is never just a one-way street.

If we harm someone else, we’re inevitably also hurting ourselves. Some quality of sensitivity and awareness has to shut down for us to be able to objectify someone else, to deny them as a living, feeling being—someone who wants to be happy, just as we do.

When we do our best to treat others with kindness, it’s often a struggle to determine which actions best express our love and care for ourselves.

When we feel conflicted about a particular decision or action, our bodies often hold the answer—if we take the time to stop and tune in.

Mindfulness is so much wiser and more robust than our inner critic.

Just as a prism refracts light differently when you change its angle, each experience of love illuminates love in new ways, drawing from an infinite palette of patterns and hues.

Forgiveness is a process, an admittedly difficult one that often can feel like a rigorous spiritual practice.

We cannot instantaneously force ourselves to forgive—and forgiveness happens at a different pace for everyone and is dependent on the particulars of any given situation.

Telling the story, acknowledging what has happened and how you feel, is often a necessary part of forgiveness.

The first step toward feeling compassion for others is to set the intention to try it out.

The combination of realizing our distinctiveness along with our unity is seeing interdependence.

If we turn away from our own pain, we may find ourselves projecting this aversion onto others, seeing them as somehow inadequate for being in a troubled situation.

The overarching practice of letting go is also one of gaining resilience and insight.

deep inside the eyes of a true lover lies the heart of a true lover.

Real Love for ourselves by definition includes every aspect of our lives—the good, the bad, the difficult, the challenging past, the uncertain future, as well as all the shameful, upsetting experiences and encounters we’d just as soon forget.

Many strong emotions are actually intricate tapestries woven of various strands.

Even as we live with the knowledge that each day might be our last, we don’t want to believe it.

Without commitment and real selflessness, real love shall always be like a sea without fish; a forest without the sweet harmonious chorus of the birds and a stomach without food