Helping others entails learning how you are helped. In order to heal others, you must learn to heal yourself. Learning how to give to yourself is part of learning how to give to others. If you are stingy with yourself, you will be stingy with others. When you understand how everything is given to you, you will be able to give everything to others.
The fundamental delusion of human beings is the belief that we exist separately and independently from the rest of the universe.
According to Shakyamuni Buddha, it's normal for human beings to be anxious, because it's normal for human beings not to understand themselves. When you don't understand yourself, you're uncomfortable and scared. When you realize that you're anxious, Buddha's teaching is to practice being patient with it.
If we turn away from our sexual passion, then we freeze and beings are harmed. If we grab it, then we are burned and beings are harmed. But if we just stay close to it, walk around it, always in touch with the fact that we are sexual beings, neither identifying with nor distancing ourselves from our sexuality, then we gradually become intimate with it.
You have to sit with your life and feel how you hold it, and be willing for the release to happen. It will happen spontaneously, because it's already so.
By understanding how all things arise together, you shift from viewing yourself as acting upon and realizing all things, to a new vision of seeing all things coming forth and realizing you.
Completely trusting a way that you can't do by yourself, that you do with all sentient beings, is immediate liberation.
Taking refuge means that you align and orient your life toward Buddha's example and toward enlightenment.
