The proof of spiritual maturity is not how pure you are but awareness of your impurity. That very awareness opens the door to grace.

We're concerned with how things turn out; God seems more concerned with how we turn out.

As I read the Bible, it seems clear that God satisfies his "eternal appetite" by loving individual human beings. I imagine He views each halting step forward in my spiritual "walk" with the eagerness of a parent watching a child take the very first step.

It's too bad prayer comes bundled in a package of 'spiritual disciplines.' Really, we should see prayer as a spiritual privilege. We don't do it as a callisthenic exercise to gain points with God; we do it, because it is good for us in every way.

Dependence, humility, simplicity, cooperation, and a sense of abandon are qualities greatly prized in the spiritual life, but extremely elusive for people who live in comfort.

In spiritual life there is no room for compromise. Awakening is not negotiable; we cannot bargain to hold on to things that please us while relinquishing things that do not matter to us. A lukewarm yearning for awakening is not enough to sustain us through the difficulties involved in letting go. It is important to understand that anything that can be lost was never truly ours, anything that we deeply cling to only imprisons us.

The basic principle of spiritual life is that our problems become the very place to discover wisdom and love.

What is truly a part of our spiritual path is that which brings us alive. If gardening brings us alive, that is part of our path, if it is music, if it is conversation...we must follow what brings us alive.

The purpose of spiritual life is not to create some special state of mind. A state of mind is always temporary. The purpose is to work directly with the most primary elements of our body and our mind, to see the ways we get trapped by our fears, desires, and anger, to learn directly our capacity for freedom.

If you want to love, take the time to listen to your heart. In most ancient and wise cultures it is a regular practice for people to talk to their heart. There are rituals, stories, and meditative skills in every spiritual tradition that awaken the voice of the heart. To live wisely, this practice is essential, because our heart is the source of our connection to and intimacy with all of life. And life is love. This mysterious quality of love is all around us, as real as gravity... Yet how often we forget about love....

When we let go of our battles and open our hearts to things as they are, then we come to rest in the present moment. This is the beginning and the end of spiritual practice.

Part of spiritual and emotional maturity is recognizing that it's not like you're going to try to fix yourself and become a different person. You remain the same person, but you become awakened.

Spiritual life doesn't make you a good person; you ARE a good person, you are a holy being when you are born. What spiritual life does is remind us that this is who we really are.

To live in this precious animal body on this earth is as great a part of spiritual life as anything else.

When we let go of our battles and open our heart to things as they are, then we come to rest in the present moment. This is the beginning and the end of spiritual practice. Only in this moment can we discover that which is timeless. Only here can we find the love that we seek. Love in the past is simply memory, and love in the future is fantasy. Only in the reality of the present can we love, can we awaken, can we find peace and understanding and connection with ourselves and the world.

To open deeply, as genuine spiritual life requires, we need tremendous courage and strength, a kind of warrior spirit.

All of spiritual practice is a matter of relationship: to ourselves, to others, to life's situations.

Much of spiritual life is self-acceptance, maybe all of it.

To undertake a genuine spiritual path is not to avoid difficulties but to learn the art of making mistakes wakefully, to bring them to the transformative power of our heart.

We need courage and strength, a kind of warrior spirit. But the place for this warrior strength is in the heart. We need energy, commitment, and courage not to run from our life nor to cover it over with any philosophy-mate rial or spiritual. We need a warrior’s heart that lets us face our lives directly, our pains and limitations, our joys and possibilities.

We don't know all the reasons that propel us on a spiritual journey, but somehow our life compels us to go.

Where we tended to be judgmental, we became more judgmental of ourselves in our spiritual practice.

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.

For most of us, generosity is a quality that must be developed. We have to respect that it will grow gradually; otherwise our spirituality can become idealistic and imitative, acting out the image of generosity before it has become genuine.