Ethan Nichtern Quotes

#1. A confused society, a deeply endangered society, is a group of people all lost in nightmarish commute. The systems, institutions, and culture of such a society discourage people from feeling the trust and belonging that come with being at home in your world. A

Ethan Nichtern

#2. In thinking of home, we have to move beyond considering home as a physical address. We have to start asking what home feels like. My

Ethan Nichtern

#3. The doormat version of idiot compassion always involves allowing ourselves to feel walked all over in the name of idealizing what it means to be patient with another person's aggressive behavior. It's an unwillingness to face the uncomfortable truth that it's okay to feel angry and irritated.

Ethan Nichtern

#4. When we stop asking the question "Whose fault is it?" and start asking the question "How can I work with this now?" then we are truly stepping onto the path of taking responsibility for our karma. When

Ethan Nichtern

#5. Thoughts aren't the problem. Problems only develop when thoughts no longer arise from or refer to actual experience. That's when thoughts start ossifying into their own bureaucratic institutions, becoming assumptions and dogma.

Ethan Nichtern

#6. It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society. - KRISHNAMURTI

Ethan Nichtern

#7. War doesn't end war any more than a heroin fix ends a heroin addiction.

Ethan Nichtern

#8. Feeling at home is the feeling that I can just be myself. It

Ethan Nichtern

#9. If we are able to take responsibility for our own mind, then we can work with whatever life throws at us without resentment or blame, and with the curiosity and self-care that are necessary for mindfulness to develop in all aspects of life. On this basis, we can also help others.

Ethan Nichtern

#10. Thinking that we have to always burn our candle at both ends in order to benefit others is perhaps the greatest idiot compassion of all.

Ethan Nichtern

#11. Spiritual bypassing often adopts a rationale based on using absolute truth to deny or disparage relative truth.

Ethan Nichtern

#12. Love requires learning to love ourselves in the mirror, and learning to look other people in the eye. Buddhism, in turn, asks us to pause and look at even the subtlest causal connections and take our appreciation of them to greater depths.

Ethan Nichtern

#13. In most cases, the truth is a blade that does not need to be sharpened, and we almost never need to twist the knife. Because as a listener we can empathize with the fear that what we hear might hurt, we can also work to apply gentleness when speaking. I

Ethan Nichtern

#14. This is perhaps the greatest lesson that interdependence has to offer us about right livelihood (and right living in general) in the twenty-first century: no person, and no profession, comes out completely clean, ever. On the other hand, no one is inherently defiled.

Ethan Nichtern

#15. Here's my personal definition of a Buddhist: someone who prioritizes cultivating her relationship to her own heartmind - and her relationship to other sentient beings - above whatever else she might achieve in life.

Ethan Nichtern

#16. Eventually, if we are going to wake up and truly come home to our own heartmind, we have to turn the full scope of our life into a practice space. This doesn't have to start as an all-the-time endeavor, but little by little it is said that our awareness practice can become a constant companion. It

Ethan Nichtern

#17. Karma is what we fabricate when we no longer trust the universe.

Ethan Nichtern

#18. One of the greatest lessons that comes from meditation is that a relaxed curiosity about life and sleepwalking through it are two radically different choices

Ethan Nichtern