Find space in your day when you can practice mindful breathing and letting go of tensions. - Thích Nhất Hạnh

"All love may begin by being passionate, especially for younger people. But in the process of living together, they have to learn and practice love, so that selfishness — the tendency to possess — will diminsh, and the elemetns of understanding and gratitude will settle in, little by little, until their love becomes nourishing, protecting, and reassuring," (41).

When you say something really unkind, when you do something in retaliation your anger increases. You make the other person suffer, and he will try hard to say or to do something back to get relief from his suffering. That is how conflict escalates.

When we get angry, we suffer. If you really understand that, you also will be able to understand that when the other person is angry, it means that she is suffering. When someone insults you or behaves violently towards you, you have to be intelligent enough to see that the person suffers from his own violence and anger. But we tend to forget. We think that we are the only one that suffers, and the other person is our oppressor. This is enough to make anger arise, and to strengthen our desire to punish. We want to punish the other person because we suffer. Then, we have anger in us; we have violence in us, just as they do. When we see that our suffering and anger are no different from their suffering and anger, we will behave more compassionately. So understanding the other is understanding yourself, and understanding yourself is understanding the other person. Everything must begin with you.