My first book, 'Radical Acceptance', grew out of the suffering of feeling personally deficient and unworthy. Because most of us are so quick to turn against ourselves, the teachings and practices of radical acceptance continue as a strong current in 'True Refuge': nurturing a forgiving, understanding heart is a basic step on the path.

Quite simply, if you're feeling anxious, angry, a sense of shame, whatever it is, breathe in and agree to touch or feel it. Breathing out, offer space and care to whatever's there. If there's blocking to touching it, emphasize the in-breath and stay embodied.

I would say both Western psychology and Eastern paths would recognize that we get caught up in feeling like a separate self and an unworthy self.

I think the reason Buddhism and Western psychology are so compatible is that Western psychology helps to identify the stories and the patterns in our personal lives, but what Buddhist awareness training does is it actually allows the person to develop skills to stay in what's going on.

I enjoy 'Murphy Brown,' but I am shocked that people really like 'Married... With Children.' These shows are toilet humor, and none of them have good characters.

Full-blooded romantic love I wouldn't be able to write about.

I spent 20 years doing research on regular and irregular verbs, not because I'm an obsessive language lover but because it seemed to me that they tapped into a fundamental distinction in language processing, indeed in cognitive processing, between memory lookup and rule-driven computation.

I've never been more in love with anyone nearly half my age than I am today. I'd get married in a minute if I weren't still married to somebody else.