Try to bring all your experience into the context of devotion to the teacher. If you can grasp this vital point of the practice, you will have no obstacles. If your situation is pleasant and easy, see your happiness, without any attachment, as the blessings of the teacher, and as a dream, an illusion. And if you go through difficulties and suffering, see that, too, as the blessings of the teacher. If you fall ill, visualize your spiritual teacher wherever it is in your body that you feel pain or that is the site of the disease. Recognize that illness and pain offer you an opportunity to purify yourself of harmful past actions and of ignorance – the sources of suffering. Keep in mind the many other beings who are suffering in the same way as you are, and pray that your suffering may absorb theirs, and that they may be liberated from all suffering. In this way, illness can teach us compassion.

Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche

from the book The Hundred Verses of Advice: Tibetan Buddhist Teachings on What Matters Most

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Further quotes from the book The Hundred Verses of Advice:

• There is never any time to spare
• Flying off into the bardo
• When you reach the threshold of death
• The faults within
• Happiness and suffering
• Put on the armor of diligence
• You will have to go
• Abandon negative friendships
• Practice with joy and enthusiasm
• The right moment is now
• Precious human life
• Contemplating the defects of samsara
• Use riches in a constructive way
• Like the events in a dream
• You won’t live forever
• Rather than being trapped by your perceptions
• The freedom to practice the Dharma
• Don’t go on following the past
• How illness can teach us compassion