When you try to use the outcome as a measure of the quality of your own being, that is the kiss of death. The way that this material world works, you can do everything right and it still goes wrong in terms of outcome. And you can do everything wrong, and it still goes right in the outcome. The outcome is not connected to the quality of your behavior, and that is such a hard idea to digest.

My father, my mother, and my grandmother, whenever I think about the three of them, I picture a triangle in my mind ... My father was the base as discipline. And my mother didn't care about anything but education—like, you had to learn, grow, study, travel. My mother was really serious about educating the mind. And my grandmother was love and God.

I think that there's always an aspect of us that when we feel unloved in any capacity, in any relationship... when we feel mistreated, when we feel somehow disrespected, it's a natural reaction to want revenge. And I think that's what happens with most people, specifically in our most vulnerable stages when we're children ... It's really hard for the ego to not click into revenge. So, the problem is that when you seek revenge, you destroy yourself, and that's the paradoxical conflict that we all live in.

If you have a difficulty with another human being, there's some point of ignorance and some point of delusion ... You are always bringing poison to the party. And if you can focus on locating and purifying the poison you brought, it opens up into entirely new avenues of connection and compromise and solutions that you can create with a person.

There's been only two times in my life when I contemplated suicide ... The once was when my mother and father separated. When my parents broke up, I was 12, and that was one of the only serious times in my life that I contemplated suicide.

Because we're so disconnected from nature, our mindset has become instant and our mindset has become now. Whereas, when you watch nature, nature is never instant.