The Great Work of Your Life

Sometimes, one reads the right book at just the right time.

Notes & Highlights

To know when to act and when to refrain from action, what is right action and what is wrong, what brings security and what brings insecurity, what brings freedom and what brings bondage: These are the signs of a pure mind.

Once you do begin to get clarity, wait to act until you have at least a kernel of inner certitude.

The presence of a sense of risk is only an indication that you’re at an important crossroads. Risk cannot be eliminated, and the attempt to eliminate it will only lead you back to paralysis.

If you are tired, keep going; if you are scared, keep going; if you are hungry, keep going; if you want to taste freedom, keep going.

There are some things, alas, from which we cannot be saved. Indeed, we cannot be saved from most of the things from which we most desperately want to be saved. We cannot really be saved from pain, from loss, from failure, from dissatisfaction. We cannot be saved from grasping and aversion.
And yet, dharma clearly does save us in many wonderful ways. Dharma saves us not by ending but rather by redeeming our suffering. It gives meaning to our suffering. It enables us to bear our suffering. And, most important, it enables our suffering to bear fruit for the world.

dharma gives us the one thing we need to be fully human: Each of us must have one domain, one small place on the globe where we can fully meet life—where we can meet it with every gift we have. One small place where, through testing ourselves, we can know the nature of life, and ultimately know ourselves. This domain, this one place that is uniquely ours, is our work in the world. Our work in the world is for each of us the axis mundi, the immovable spot—the one place where we really have the opportunity to wake up