if we can allow ourselves to be gentle with ourselves no matter what our feelings may be, we have the chance of discovering the very deep roots of who we are.

don't run away
from heavy emotions
honor the anger;
give pain the space
it needs to breathe
this is how we let go

Don’t run away from things that are unpleasant in order to embrace things that are pleasant. Put your hands in the earth. Face the difficulties and grow new happiness.

You have to detach from those emotions — step back from them a little so they don’t control you. You can do that by taking a deep breath and telling yourself to calm down.

Learn to hold your own feelings like beloved children, however intensely they burn and scream for attention. Celebrate the aliveness in your hurt, the vibrancy of your disappointment, the electricity of your sadness. Kneel before the power in your anger; honor its fiery creativity. From this place of deep acceptance, you do not become weak and passive. Quite the opposite. You simply enter the world from a place of non-violence, and therefore immense creative power, and you are open to the possibility of deep listening, honest dialogue, and unexpected change. In suffering, you become small. In love, anything is possible.

As we practice meditation, we get used to stillness and eventually are able to make
friends with the quietness of our sensations.

You have to be able to center yourself, to let all of your emotions go. Don’t ever forget that you play with your soul as well as your body.

After years of being taught that the way to deal with painful emotions is to get rid of them, it can take a lot of reschooling to learn to sit with them instead, finding out from those who feel them what they have learned by sleeping in the wilderness that those who sleep in comfortable houses may never know.

Meditate. Breathe consciously. Listen. Pay attention. Treasure every moment. Make the connection.

If we can relax when our strong emotions come, then we don’t pass fear on to our children and to future generations.

Ordinarily we are swept away by habitual momentum. We don't interrupt our patterns even slightly. With practice, however, we learn to stay with a broken heart, with a nameless fear, with the desire for revenge. Sticking with uncertainty is how we learn to relax in the midst of chaos, how we learn to be cool when the ground beneath us suddenly disappears.

Take any emotion — love for a woman, or grief for a loved one, or what I’m going through, fear and pain from a deadly illness. If you hold back on the emotions — if you don’t allow yourself to go all the way through them — you can never get to being detached, you’re too busy being afraid. You’re afraid of the pain, you’re afraid of the grief. You’re afraid of the vulnerability that loving entails. “But by throwing yourself into these emotions, by allowing yourself to dive in, all the way, over your head even, you experience them fully and completely. You know what pain is. You know what love is. You know what grief is. And only then can you say, ‘All right. I have experienced that emotion. I recognize that emotion. Now I need to detach from that emotion for a moment’.

I think that somehow, we learn who we really are and then live with that decision.

I’ve discovered that when something very emotional happens to me, it stays with me until I’ve converted it into lessons.