Top 25 Quotes & Sayings by Tsoknyi Rinpoche

Simply let experience take place very freely, so that your open heart is suffused with the tenderness of true compassion.

Our top priority is to relieve suffering of human beings.

When you have achieved a state of calmness and readiness, then you are ready to know, ready to understand in a deep way the dance between emptiness and appearance. Once you catch a glimpse of that dance, don't hang on to it. Just let it go, like your first glimpse of essence love.

Your emotional understanding about the preciousness of your human birth comes through conscious, repetitive mind training.

You don't have to say anything. You don't have to teach anything. You just have to be who you are: a bright flame shining in the darkness of despair, a shining example of a person able to cross bridges by opening your heart and mind.

Look at your life. Look at the ways in which you define who you are and what you’re capable of achieving. Look at your goals. Look at the pressures applied by the people around you and the culture in which you were raised. Look again. And again. Keep looking until you realize, within your own experience, that you’re so much more than who you believe you are. Keep looking until you discover the wondrous heart, the marvelous mind, that is the very basis of your being.

Whether a Buddha comes into the world or not, the nature of things is still the nature of things. The Buddha is someone who realizes what is true, what actually exists. If we want to become enlightened, we simply have to acknowledge or recognize what is.

We believe deep down that we've lost something precious and are seeking it outside ourselves, never realizing that we are carrying it within us wherever we go.

True compassion is undirected & holds no conceptual focus. That kind of genuine, true compassion is only possible after realizing emptiness.

Instead of focusing on some thoughts and feelings and pushing away others, just look at them as feathers flying in the wind. The wind is your awareness, your inborn openness and clarity.

Every time you connect, a little bit more clarity stays around the love, a little bit more space opens up around it. your mind becomes clearer. you experience expanded possibilities. You become a little more confident, a little more willing to connect with others, a little more willing to open up to other people, whether that means talking about your own stuff or listen to theirs. And as that happens a little miracle occurs: You're giving, without expectation in return. Your very being becomes, consciously or not, an inspiration to others

Practicing discipline involves continually working to find space in our patterns, to find the gaps in the images we hold about ourselves. It also means finding the gaps in our ideas about others, releasing images that we hold about a manager, a coworker, a friend, or a partner.

Life begins with love, is maintained with love, and ends with love. Right now, while we're alive, is the time to practice and express love. So please take care of your love. Love is capable of reaching so many people.

Through recognizing and realizing the empty essence, instead of being selfish and self-centered, one feels very open and free

True freedom comes about through confidence in liberating any and all thought states.

When you first start out don't set yourself a lofty goal of sitting down to meditate for twenty minutes. Aim instead for ten minutes or even five minutes - utilizing those few moments when you find yourself willing or even desiring just to take a break from the daily grind to observe your mind rather than drifting off into daydreams.

The point is to be free, not to be crazy.

Whenever ego suffers from fear of death & your practice turns to seeing impermanence, ego settles down.

Instead of thinking of this and that, one thing after the other, let your mind recognize itself in a single moment. When the mind recognizes itself, there is no thing to see there. It’s just wide open. That’s because the essence of mind is empty. It’s wide open and free

Be kind to yourself as you proceed along this journey. This kindness, in itself, is a means of awakening the spark of love within you and helping others to discover that spark within themselves.

A mantra is basically a means of talking with your thoughts and feelings. It's a time-honored method sometimes referred to as prayer, but really it's an opening of a conversation between the heart and the mind.

Let yourself become that space that welcomes any experience without judgement.

The true bodhisattva spirit grows out of this personal sense of freedom. You discover that you don't feel so needy anymore. You don't crave another refueling - with shamatha or with other people's love and attention - because you know within yourself how to be free, how to be confident. With this sense of security and freedom, you begin to direct your attention to the needs of others. The compassion expands.

Being carefree, you can fit in anywhere. If you’re not carefree you keep on bumping up against things. Your life becomes so narrow, so tight; it gets very claustrophobic. Carefree means being wide open from within, not constricted. Carefree doesn’t mean careless. It is not that you don’t care about others, not that you don’t have compassion or are unfriendly. Carefree is being really simple, from the inside. Dignity is not conceit but rather what shines forth from this carefree confidence.

If we can allow some space within our awareness and rest there, we can respect our troubling thoughts and emotions, allow them to come, and let them go. Our lives may be complicated on the outside, but we remain simple, easy, and open on the inside.