Once we are honest about our feelings, we can invite ourselves to consider alternative modes of viewing our pain and can see that releasing our grip … - Sharon Salzberg

Cultivating loving kindness for ourselves is the foundation of real love for our friends and family, for new people we encounter in our daily lives, for all beings and for life itself.

In one of the verses of Lal Ded, or Lalla, a fourteenth-century mystic from Kashmir, Lalla says: “At the end of a crazy-moon night the love of God rose. I said “It’s me, Lalla.”
“It’s me, Lalla,” becomes “It’s me…whoever you are,” proclaiming that we no longer stand on the sidelines but are leaping directly into the center of our lives, our truth, our full potential. No one can take that leap for us; and no one has to. This is our journey of faith.

Effort is the unconstrained willingness to persevere through difficulty.