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:

• The Dharma is the best way of using your life
• There is never any time to spare
• Practice with joy and enthusiasm
• Start that very day
• Without settling anywhere
• Precious human life
• Dreamlike obsessions
• The right moment is now
• The union of clarity and emptiness
• Right here beside you
• Like the events in a dream
• Don’t go on following the past
• You will have to go
• The faults within
• The choice is clear
• When you reach the threshold of death
• Have you prepared yourselves a boat
• Putting down the heavy burden once and for all
• The freedom to practice the Dharma