Explore the most impactful and insightful quotes and sayings by Sharon Salzberg, and enrich your perspective with the wisdom. Share these inspiring Sharon Salzberg quotes pictures with your friends on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, completely free. Here are the top 465 Sharon Salzberg quotes for you to read and share.
Metta sees truly that our integrity is inviolate, no matter what our life situation may be. We do not need to fear anything. We are whole: our deepest happiness is intrinsic to the nature of our minds, and it is not damaged through uncertainty and change. -- Sharon Salzberg
Being happy at work is possible for all of us, anytime & anywhere, with open eyes and a caring heart -- Sharon Salzberg
Telling the story, acknowledging what has happened and how you feel, is often a necessary part of forgiveness. -- Sharon Salzberg
Pain is tough, but it's going to leave us. Pleasure is wonderful, but it's going to leave us. You can't hang on to pleasure; you can't stop pain from coming; you can be aware. -- Sharon Salzberg
Often we can achieve an even better result when we stumble yet are willing to start over, when we don't give up after a mistake, when something doesn't come easily but we throw ourselves into trying, when we're not afraid to appear less than perfectly polished. -- Sharon Salzberg
if we really look at our actions with eyes of love, we see that our lives can be more straightforward, simpler, less sculpted by regret and fear, more in alignment with our deepest values. -- Sharon Salzberg
To relinquish the futile effort to control change is one of the strengthening forces of true detachment & thus true love. -- Sharon Salzberg
The causes of familial discord and distance are countless, but the results are often the same: secrecy, blame, sadness, hurt, confusion, and feelings of loss and grief. -- Sharon Salzberg
Forgiveness can be bittersweet. It contains the sweetness of the release of a story that has caused us pain, but also the poignant reminder that even our dearest relationships change over the course of a lifetime. -- Sharon Salzberg
With mindfulness, loving kindness, and self-compassion, we can begin to let go of our expectations about how life and those we love should be. -- Sharon Salzberg
As we hone the ability to let go of distraction, to begin again without rancor or judgment, we are deepening forgiveness and compassion for ourselves. And in life, we find we might make a mistake, and more easily begin again, or stray from our chosen course and begin again. -- Sharon Salzberg
When we feel conflicted about a particular decision or action, our bodies often hold the answer - if we take the time to stop and tune in. -- Sharon Salzberg
You should never use the word Karma when talking about someone else, it's only a concept you should apply to yourself as a matter of investigation. -- Sharon Salzberg
Concepts such as loving kindness should never be used as weapons against our real feelings. -- Sharon Salzberg
For all of us, love can be the natural state of our own being; naturally at peace, naturally connected, because this becomes the reflection of who we simply are. -- Sharon Salzberg
I need to start over. I can't just stay stuck in this place. This is a wonderful skill to bring to your life. -- Sharon Salzberg
We learn from conflicts only when we are willing to do so. -- Sharon Salzberg
Sometimes people in abusive situations think they're responsible for the other person's happiness or that they're going to fix them and make them feel better. The practice of equanimity teaches that it's not all up to you to make someone else happy. -- Sharon Salzberg
My ideal registration system would be an opt-out one, where every single person is registered once they turn 18. In Australia, I'm told, everyone is registered to vote and you pay a fine if you don't vote. -- Sharon Salzberg
Cultivating loving kindness for ourselves is the foundation of real love for our friends and family, for new people we encounter in our daily lives, for all beings and for life itself. -- Sharon Salzberg
If we harm someone else, we're inevitably also hurting ourselves. Some quality of sensitivity and awareness has to shut down for us to be able to objectify someone else, to deny them as a living, feeling being - someone who wants to be happy, just as we do. -- Sharon Salzberg
When we open our hearts to the breadth of our experiences, we learn to tune into our needs, unique perceptions, thoughts & feelings -- Sharon Salzberg
I see real love as the most fundamental of our innate capacities, never destroyed no matter what we might have gone through or might yet go through. -- Sharon Salzberg
Anger often makes us hurt ourselves more than any enemy. -- Sharon Salzberg
Meeting people in a genuine way and feeling like there is a vital and meaningful connection going on makes me come alive. -- Sharon Salzberg
Once someone appears to us primarily as an object, kindness has no place to root. -- Sharon Salzberg
We can understand the inherent radiance & purity of our minds by understanding metta. Like the mind, metta is not distorted by what it encounters. -- Sharon Salzberg
We like things to manifest right away, and they may not. Many times, we're just planting a seed and we don't know exactly how it is going to come to fruition. It's hard for us to realize that what we see in front of us might not be the end of the story. -- Sharon Salzberg
If we truly loved ourselves, we'd never harm another. That is a truly revolutionary, celebratory mode of self-care. -- Sharon Salzberg
To remember non-attachment is to remember what freedom is all about. If we get attached, even to a beautiful state of being, we are caught, and ultimately we will suffer. We work to observe anything that comes our way, experience it while it is here, and be able to let go of it. -- Sharon Salzberg
When our focus is on seeking, perfecting, or clinging to romance, the charge is often generated by instability, rather than by an authentic connection with another person. -- Sharon Salzberg
In order to free ourselves from our assumptions about love, we must ask ourselves what long-held, often buried assumptions are and then face them, which takes courage, humility, and kindness. -- Sharon Salzberg
Love is defined by difficult acts of human compassion & generosity. -- Sharon Salzberg
I prefer to think of faith, as Coleridge says of poetry, not as the taking up of belief but as "the willing suspension of disbelief" ... a willingness to be open, to explore, to investigate. -- Sharon Salzberg
I believe that there is only one kind of love - real love - trying to come alive in us despite our limiting assumptions, the distortions of our culture, and the habits of fear, self-condemnation, and isolation that we tend to acquire just by living a life. -- Sharon Salzberg
Letting go - abandoning, relinquishing - is actually the same mind state as generosity. So the practice of giving deeply influences the feeling tone of our meditation practice, and vice versa. -- Sharon Salzberg
My experience working with lots of creative people is that they don't lose their artistic edge when they lose a fierce level of anguish. They just create from a different place. -- Sharon Salzberg
The overarching practice of letting go is also one of gaining resilience and insight. -- Sharon Salzberg
Compassion has more to do with the attitude we bring to our encounters with other people than with any quantifiable metric of giving. -- Sharon Salzberg
Sanskrit has different words to describe love for a brother or sister, love for a teacher, love for a partner, love for one's friends, love of nature, and so on. English has only one word, which leads to never-ending confusion. -- Sharon Salzberg
Love and concern for all are not things some of us are born with and others are not. Rather, they are results of what we do with our minds: We can choose to transform our minds so that they embody love, or we can allow them to develop habits and false concepts of separation. -- Sharon Salzberg
Equanimity can be hard to talk about. -- Sharon Salzberg
A particularly difficult line to navigate is the one between fear and love, especially for parents, who want more than anything to protect their children from suffering. -- Sharon Salzberg
Faith is not a commodity we either have or don't have-it is an inner quality that unfolds as we learn to trust our own deepest experience. -- Sharon Salzberg
Respecting differences while gaining insight into our essential connected-ness, we can free ourselves from the impulse to rigidly categorize the world in terms of narrow boundaries and labels. -- Sharon Salzberg
Buddhism has a term for the happiness we feel at someone else's success or good fortune. Sympathetic joy, as it is known, invites us to celebrate for others. -- Sharon Salzberg
When we relate to ourselves with loving kindness, perfectionism naturally drops away. -- Sharon Salzberg
Whether we fear the existence of boundaries with others or crave more of them, there's no denying that individuation and separation are inevitable parts of loving relationships that become the site of tension. -- Sharon Salzberg
Looking at people and communicating that they can be loved, and that they can love in return, is giving them a tremendous gift. It is also a gift to ourselves. We see that we are one with the fabric of life. This is the power of metta: to teach ourselves and our world this inherent loveliness. -- Sharon Salzberg
The middle way is a view of life that avoids the extreme of misguided grasping born of believing there is something we can find, or buy, or cling to that will not change. And it avoids the despair and nihilism born from the mistaken belief that nothing matters, that all is meaningless. -- Sharon Salzberg
When we are devoted to the development of kindness, it becomes our ready response, so that reacting from compassion, from caring, is not a question of giving ourselves a lecture: 'I don't really feel like it, but I'd better be helpful, or what would people think?' -- Sharon Salzberg
Loving kindness is the practice of offering to oneself and others wishes to be happy, peaceful, healthy, strong -- Sharon Salzberg
The notion of loving oneself has gotten an undeservedly bad rap, which goes something like this: self-love is narcissistic, selfish, self-indulgent, the supreme delusion of a runaway ego looking out for "number one." In fact, just the opposite is true. -- Sharon Salzberg
Genuine awe connects us with the world in a new way. -- Sharon Salzberg
Seeking happiness is not the problem. The problem is that we often do not know where and how to find genuine happiness and so make the mistakes that cause suffering for ourselves & others. -- Sharon Salzberg
If we turn away from our own pain, we may find ourselves projecting this aversion onto others, seeing them as somehow inadequate for being in a troubled situation. -- Sharon Salzberg
Cultivation of positive emotions, including self-love and self-respect, strengthens our inner resources and opens us to a broader range of thoughts and actions. -- Sharon Salzberg
To celebrate someone else's life, we need to find a way to look at it straight on, not from above with judgment or from below with envy. -- Sharon Salzberg
The art of concentration is a continual letting go. We let go of what is inessential or distracting. We let go of a thought or a feeling, not because we are afraid of it or because we can't bear to acknowledge it as a part of our experience; but, because it is UNNECESSARY. -- Sharon Salzberg
If you go deeper and deeper into your own heart, you'll be living in a world with less fear, isolation and loneliness. -- Sharon Salzberg
What happens in our hearts is our field of freedom. As long as we carry old wounds and anger in our hearts, we continue to suffer. Forgiveness allows us to move on. -- Sharon Salzberg
It's interesting that people bring different things to oppressive and difficult situations, when they're reduced to the barest terms of survival. That's what provides tension in a lot of films. -- Sharon Salzberg
As an ability, love is always there as a potential, ready to flourish and
help our lives flourish. As we go up and down in life, as we acquire or
lose, as we are showered with praise or unfairly blamed, always within
there is the ability of love, recognized or not, given life or not. -- Sharon Salzberg
The idea that traumatic residues - or unresolved stories - can be inherited is groundbreaking. -- Sharon Salzberg
If I am feeling stupid, angry, jealous, or humiliated, I bring total awareness and acknowledgment to those feelings. I admit my failures and own them. Then I usually start laughing as I realize how small and inconsequential I really am and also how ridiculous my problems are! -- Sharon Salzberg
Our practice rather than being about killing the ego is about simply discovering our true nature. -- Sharon Salzberg
Mindfulness allows us to watch our thoughts, see how one thought leads to the next, decide if we're heading down an unhealthy path, and, if so, let go and change directions. -- Sharon Salzberg
Self-compassion is like a muscle. The more we practice flexing it, especially when life doesn't go exactly according to plan (a frequent scenario for most of us), the stronger and more resilient our compassion muscle becomes. -- Sharon Salzberg
When you're wide open, the world is a good place. -- Sharon Salzberg
Not paying attention keeps us in an endless cycle of wanting. -- Sharon Salzberg
The more we practice mindfulness, the more alert we become to the cost of keeping secrets. -- Sharon Salzberg
Mindfulness may help you gain insight into your role in conflicts with others, it won't single-highhandedly help you resolve them. -- Sharon Salzberg
How we traverse the space between us when conflict arises has a profound effect on the health and longevity of our relationships. -- Sharon Salzberg
When your attention is diffuse, it's like a broad, weak beam of light that doesn't reveal much. Concentration brings the weak beam down to a single, sharply focused, supremely bright, exponentially more illuminating point. -- Sharon Salzberg
Loving-kindness challenges those states that tend to arise when we think of ourselves as isolated from everyone else - fear, a sense of deficiency, alienation, loneliness. -- Sharon Salzberg
When we contemplate the miracle of embodied life, we begin to partner with our bodies in a kinder way. -- Sharon Salzberg
The difference between a life laced through with frustration and one sustained by happiness depends on whether it is motivated by self-hatred or by real love for oneself. -- Sharon Salzberg
You are capable of so much more than we usually dare to imagine -- Sharon Salzberg
Vulnerability in the face of constant change is what we share, whatever our present condition. -- Sharon Salzberg
We exercise kindness in any moment when we recognize our shared humanity - with all the hopes, dreams, joys, disappointments, vulnerability, and suffering that implies. -- Sharon Salzberg
The unconscious mind is a vast repository of experiences and associations that sorts things out much faster than the slow-moving conscious mind. -- Sharon Salzberg
In Buddhism there is one word for mind & heart: chitta. Chitta refers not just to thoughts and emotions in the narrow sense of arising from the brain, but also to the whole range of consciousness, vast & unimpeded. -- Sharon Salzberg
Meditation can be a refuge, but it is not a practice in which real life is ever excluded. The strength of mindfulness is that it enables us to hold difficult thoughts and feelings in a different way - with awareness, balance, and love -- Sharon Salzberg
Even when we do our very best to treat those close to us with utmost respect and understanding, conflict happens. That's life. That's human nature. -- Sharon Salzberg
All of our actions can signify self-love or self-sabotage -- Sharon Salzberg
We can travel a long way in life and do many things, but our deepest happiness is not born from accumulating new experiences. it is born from letting go of what is unnecessary, and knowing ourselves to be always at home. -- Sharon Salzberg
With our close friends, family members, and lovers, we hope to create a special world, one in which we can expect to be treated fairly, with care, tenderness, and compassion. -- Sharon Salzberg
Mindfulness won't ensure you'll win an argument with your sister. Mindfulness won't enable you to bypass your feelings of anger or hurt either. But it may help you see the conflict in a new way, one that allows you to break through old patterns. -- Sharon Salzberg
Setting the intention to practice kindness toward one's partner or family members or friends does not preclude getting angry or upset. -- Sharon Salzberg
To reteach a thing its loveliness is the nature of metta. Through lovingkindness, everyone & everything can flower again from within. -- Sharon Salzberg
We can learn the art of fierce compassion - redefining strength, deconstructing isolation and renewing a sense of community, practicing letting go of rigid us-vs.-them thinking - while cultivating power and clarity in response to difficult situations. -- Sharon Salzberg
It is awareness of both our shared pain and our longing for happiness that links us to other people and helps us to turn toward them with compassion. -- Sharon Salzberg
No connection is always easy or free of strife, no matter how many minutes a day we meditate. It's how we relate to conflict, as well as to our differing needs and expectations, that makes our relationships sustainable. -- Sharon Salzberg
Sympathetic joy is a practice. It takes time and effort to free ourselves of the scarcity story that most of us have learned along the way, the idea that happiness is a competition, and that someone else is grabbing all the joy. -- Sharon Salzberg
Pure generosity emerges when we give without the need for our offering to be received in a certain way. That's why the best kind of generosity comes from inner abundance, rather than from feeling deficient and hollow, starved for validation. -- Sharon Salzberg
Some things hurt, you know, and there's pain. But we magnify the suffering of it often, I think, by our reactions. -- Sharon Salzberg
I think so many people tend to think of faith as blind adherence to a dogma or unquestioned surrender to an authority figure, and the result is losing self-respect and losing our own sense of what is true. And I don't think of faith in those terms at all. -- Sharon Salzberg
If we have a very strong commitment, so that we can trust ourselves and be beacons of trust for others no matter what the circumstance, then we're protected from suffering the consequences of many actions. We can be protected from that pain. -- Sharon Salzberg
When we direct a lot of hostile energy toward the inner critic, we enter into a losing battle. -- Sharon Salzberg
Any time we find ourselves relying on the ideas of an absolute, frozen state of right and wrong - or fairness versus unfairness - that we are used to, we can compare the habit to distraction during meditation. -- Sharon Salzberg
I think what we (as a society) need from artists of all kinds is courage, a willingness to explore, and a really big sense of possibility. -- Sharon Salzberg
Our ability to connect with others is innate, wired into our nervous systems, and we need connection as much as we need physical nourishment. -- Sharon Salzberg
I'm learning that to be at home everywhere, I have to be sure to include the place I actually live. -- Sharon Salzberg
Mindfulness practice helps create space between our actual experiences and the reflexive stories we tend to tell about them. -- Sharon Salzberg
When we forgive someone, we don't pretend that the harm didn't happen or cause us pain. We see it clearly for what it was, but we also come to see that fixating on the memory of harm generates anger and sadness. -- Sharon Salzberg
Someone who has experienced trauma also has gifts to offer all of us - in their depth, their knowledge of our universal vulnerability, and their experience of the power of compassion. -- Sharon Salzberg
Every single moment is expressive of the truth of our lives when we know how to look. -- Sharon Salzberg
The secure attachment of Western psychology is actually akin to Buddhist non-attachment; avoid-ant attachment is the inverse of being mindful and present; and anxious attachment aligns with Buddhist notions of clinging and grasping. -- Sharon Salzberg
Evolutionary biologists tell us we have a "negativity bias" that makes our brains remember negative events more strongly than positive ones. So when we're feeling lost or discouraged, it can be very hard to conjure up memories and feelings of happiness and ease. -- Sharon Salzberg
Everyone loses touch with their aspiration, and we need the heart to return to what we really care about. All of this is based on developing greater lovingkindness and compassion. -- Sharon Salzberg
One foundation of loving relationships is curiosity, keeping open to the idea that we have much to learn even about those we have been close to for decades. -- Sharon Salzberg
When we respond to our pain and suffering with love, understanding, and acceptance - for ourselves, as well as others - over time, we can let go of our anger, even when we've been hurt to the core. But that doesn't mean we ever forget. -- Sharon Salzberg
Forgiveness is a process, an admittedly difficult one that often can feel like a rigorous spiritual practice. -- Sharon Salzberg
When we experience inner impoverishment, love for another too easily becomes hunger: for reassurance, for acclaim, for affirmation of our worth. -- Sharon Salzberg
People turn to meditation because they want to make good decisions, break bad habits & bounce back better from disappointments. -- Sharon Salzberg
Even as we recognize our resentment, bitterness, or jealousy, we can also honor our own wish to be happy, to feel free. -- Sharon Salzberg
What is important is not getting intoxicated with a good feeling or getting intoxicated even with an insight. These take many forms in our practice. We go through times of great release, where there has been physical holding for what feels like forever, and something opens up and releases. -- Sharon Salzberg
Everything is impermanent: happiness, sorrow, a great meal, a powerful empire, what we're feeling, the people around us, ourselves. -- Sharon Salzberg
Distraction wastes our energy, concentration restores it. -- Sharon Salzberg
We're in charge of our own forgiveness, and the process takes time, patience, and intention. -- Sharon Salzberg
With a clear intention and a willing spirit, sooner or later we experience the joy and freedom that arises when we recognize our common humanity with others and see that real love excludes no one. -- Sharon Salzberg
The first step toward feeling compassion for others is to set the intention to try it out. -- Sharon Salzberg
When we set an intention to explore our emotional hot spots, we create a pathway to real love. -- Sharon Salzberg
There's no denying that it takes effort to set the intention to see our fundamental connected-ness with others. -- Sharon Salzberg
Compassion is born out of lovingkindness.
It is born of knowing our oneness, not just thinking about it or wishing it were so. It is born out of the wisdom of seeing things exactly as they are. -- Sharon Salzberg
I've always said that lovingkindness and compassion are inevitably woven throughout meditation practice even if the words are never used or implied, no matter what technique or method we are using. -- Sharon Salzberg
All forms of meditation strengthen & direct our attention through the cultivation of three key skills: concentration, mindfulness & compassion or lovingkindness. -- Sharon Salzberg
The manifestation of the free mind is said to be lovingkindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity. -- Sharon Salzberg
As we work to reweave the strands of connection, we can be supported by the wisdom and lovingkindness of others. -- Sharon Salzberg
Though it may seem counter intuitive to our inner perfectionist, recognizing our mistakes as valuable lessons (not failures) helps us lay the groundwork for later success. -- Sharon Salzberg
The journey to loving ourselves doesn't mean we like everything. -- Sharon Salzberg
Can you imagine a mind state in which there is no bitter, condemning judgement of oneself or of others? This mind does not see the world in terms of good and bad,might and wrong, good and evil; it sees only 'suffering and the end of suffering. -- Sharon Salzberg
Meditation is the ultimate mobile device; you can use it anywhere, anytime, unobtrusively. -- Sharon Salzberg
Often in close relationships, the subject being discussed is not the subject at all. -- Sharon Salzberg
So often, fear keeps us from being able to say yes to love - perhaps our greatest challenge as human beings. -- Sharon Salzberg
Once we are honest about our feelings, we can invite ourselves to consider alternative modes of viewing our pain and can see that releasing our grip on anger and resentment can actually be an act of self-compassion. -- Sharon Salzberg
In reality, love is fluid; it's a verb, not a noun. -- Sharon Salzberg
Even in the midst of devastation, something within us always points the way to freedom. -- Sharon Salzberg
It's difficult to admit to ourselves that we suffer. We feel humiliated, like we should have been able to control our pain. If someone else is suffering, we like to tuck them away, out of sight. It's a cruel, cruel conditioning. There is no controlling the unfolding of life. -- Sharon Salzberg
When we approach the journey acknowledging what we do not know and what we can't control, we maintain our energy for the quest. -- Sharon Salzberg
Balance The Stress Factor The Beauty of Mental Space Emotional Intelligence Take A Breath Negative Emotions Time and Priorities Boundaries A Culture of Wellness -- Sharon Salzberg
Until we begin to question our basic assumptions about ourselves and view them as fluid, not fixed, it's easy to repeat established patterns and, out of habit, reenact old stories that limit our ability to live and love ourselves with an open heart. -- Sharon Salzberg
In a situation of potential conflict, let compassion guide you. -- Sharon Salzberg
Abiding faith does not depend on borrowed concepts. Rather, it is the magnetic force of a bone-deep, lived understanding, one that draws us to realize our ideals, walk our talk,and act in accord with what we know to be true. -- Sharon Salzberg
If we define ourselves by each of the ever-changing feelings that cascade through us, how will we ever feel at home in our own bodies and minds? -- Sharon Salzberg
By accepting and learning to embrace the inevitable sorrows of life, we realize that we can experience a more enduring sense of happiness. -- Sharon Salzberg
The costs of keeping secrets include our growing isolation due to fear of detection and the ways we shut down inside to avoid feeling the effects of our behavior. We can never afford to be truly seen and known - even by ourselves. -- Sharon Salzberg
We are taught that revenge is strong and compassion is weak. We are taught that power is more important than love. -- Sharon Salzberg
Ten thousand flowers in spring, the moon in autumn, A cool breeze in summer, snow in winter - If your mind is not clouded by unnecessary things, this is the best season of your life. -- Sharon Salzberg
Things don't just happen in this world of arising and passing away. We don't live in some kind of crazy, accidental universe. Things happen according to certain laws, laws of nature. Laws such as the law of karma, which teaches us that as a certain seed gets planted, so will that fruit be. -- Sharon Salzberg
When we experience dissatisfaction at work, which everyone does we can use our disappointment as fuel to wake up. -- Sharon Salzberg
We truly can reconfigure how we see ourselves and reclaim the love for ourselves that we're innately capable of. -- Sharon Salzberg
When we can step back even briefly from our hurt, sorrow, and anger, when we put our faith in the possibility of change, we create the possibility for non-judgmental inquiry that aims for healing rather than victory. -- Sharon Salzberg
Asking questions is an opportunity for creativity and personal expression, both for the person asking and the person answering. -- Sharon Salzberg
We have the power to improve our work lives immeasurably through awareness, compassion, patience & ingenuity. -- Sharon Salzberg
Letting go is an inside job, something only we can do for ourselves. -- Sharon Salzberg
Never feel ashamed of your longing for happiness. -- Sharon Salzberg
Ultimately, we forgive others in order to free ourselves. -- Sharon Salzberg
Communication and Connection Skillful Self-Expression What Do We Want? The Culture of Disparagement Appreciative Inquiry Gossip Paying Attention The Realm of Email Teamwork The Ripple Effect -- Sharon Salzberg
As soon as we ask whether or not a story is true in the present moment, we empower ourselves to re-frame it. -- Sharon Salzberg
Ask yourself, 'who is the one suffering from this anger? The person who has harmed me has gone on to live their life (or perhaps has died), while I am the one sitting here feeling the persecution, burning and constriction of anger. Out of compassion for myself, to ease my own heart, may I let go. -- Sharon Salzberg
It's a rare and precious thing to be close to suffering because our society - in many ways - tells us that suffering is wrong. If it's our own suffering, we try to hide it or isolate ourselves. If others are suffering, we're taught to put them away somewhere so we don't have to see it. -- Sharon Salzberg
The practice of sympathetic joy is rooted in inner development. It's not a matter of learning techniques to "make friends and influence people." Instead, we build the foundations of our own happiness. When our own cup is full, we more easily share it with others. -- Sharon Salzberg
Fearful of wasting a second, we hoard time as if it were money. -- Sharon Salzberg
To be truly happy in this world is a revolutionary act ... It is a radical change of view that liberates us so that we know who we are most deeply and can acknowledge our enormous ability to love. -- Sharon Salzberg
Training attention through meditation opens our eyes. -- Sharon Salzberg
In more ways than any of us can name, love is wrapped up with the idea of expectation. -- Sharon Salzberg
Real forgiveness in close relationships is never easy. It can't be rushed or engineered. -- Sharon Salzberg
We nurture our sense of connection with the larger whole, noticing that the whole is only as healthy as its smallest part. -- Sharon Salzberg
Without equanimity, we might give love to others only in an effort to bridge the inevitable and healthy space that always exists between two people. -- Sharon Salzberg
Whatever language we use use to describe healthy relationships, when we're in them, we feel nourished by them, in body as well as mind. -- Sharon Salzberg
We spend our lives searching for something we think we don't have, something that will make us happy. But the key to our deepest happiness lies in changing our vision of where to seek it. -- Sharon Salzberg
The movement of the heart as we practice generosity in the outer world mirrors the movement of the heart when we let go of conditioned views about ourselves on our inner journey. Letting go creates a joyful sense of space in our minds -- Sharon Salzberg
We do good because it frees the heart. It opens us to a wellspring of happiness. -- Sharon Salzberg
Letting go of the belief that we're powerless to help relieve our own suffering enhances our ability not only to heal but also to genuinely love and receive the love of others. -- Sharon Salzberg
As we look around, it's very clear that in this world people do outrageous things to one another all of the time. It's not that these qualities or actions make us bad people, but they bring tremendous suffering if we don't know how to work with them. -- Sharon Salzberg
You can see your thoughts and emotions arise & create space for them even if they are uncomfortable. -- Sharon Salzberg
Maybe what we really need is to change our relationship to what is, to see who we are with the strength of a generous spirit & a wise heart. -- Sharon Salzberg
What makes awe such a powerful call to love is that it's disruptive. It sneaks up on us. It doesn't ask our permission to wow us; it just does. Awe can arise from a single glance, a sound, a gesture. -- Sharon Salzberg
The environment we create can help heal us or fracture us. This is true not just for buildings and landscapes but also for interactions and relationships. -- Sharon Salzberg
Detachment is not about refusing to feel or not caring or turning away from those you love. Detachment is profoundly honest, grounded firmly in the truth of what is. -- Sharon Salzberg
When we do our best to treat others with kindness, it's often a struggle to determine which actions best express our love and care for ourselves. -- Sharon Salzberg
As we practice meditation, we get used to stillness and eventually are able to make
friends with the quietness of our sensations. -- Sharon Salzberg
When we pay attention to sensations in our bodies, we can feel that love is the energetic opposite of fear. -- Sharon Salzberg
Life is like an ever-shifting kaleidoscope - a slight change, and all patterns alter. -- Sharon Salzberg
But if people are genuinely happy in their choice of action or lifestyle, we do not need to impose our standards. If they are not harming themselves, if they are not harming others, can we be generous enough to feel joy for them? That is the practice of mudita. -- Sharon Salzberg
To cherish others is to cherish ourselves. To cherish ourselves is to cherish others. And in that same way, we relate to the truth. If we support it, if we embrace it, if we uphold it, we will be embraced by it, we will be supported and upheld by it. -- Sharon Salzberg
The breath is the first tool for opening the space between the story you tell yourself about love. -- Sharon Salzberg
Mindfulness helps us get better at seeing the difference between what's happening and the stories we tell ourselves about what's happening, stories that get in the way of direct experience. Often such stories treat a fleeting state of mind as if it were our entire and permanent self. -- Sharon Salzberg
To forgive, we may need to open our minds to a fuller exploration of the context in which the events occurred, and feel compassion for the circumstances and everyone involved, starting with ourselves. -- Sharon Salzberg
But to take delight in our generosity helps us immeasurably in our spiritual practice. -- Sharon Salzberg
We live in this world of great promise, where everything seems to offer an unchanging final happiness, if we can only get enough of it. It is very intoxicating. -- Sharon Salzberg
Chanting is a simple practice. When you notice you are thinking about something else during the chant, let go of the thought and come back home, to the chant, to that place where we are expressing our inner purity. -- Sharon Salzberg
Paying attention to the ethical implications of our choices has never been more pressing - or more complicated - than it is today. -- Sharon Salzberg
If we stretch ourselves to open our minds, to see our shared humanity with others, we allow ourselves to see the existence of community and generosity in unexpected places. -- Sharon Salzberg
When we are willing to explore our own experiences, we open the doorway to deeper connection and intimacy. -- Sharon Salzberg
From our first breath to our last, we're presented again and again with the opportunity to experience deep, lasting, and trans-formative connection with other beings: to love them and be loved by them; to show them our true natures and to recognize theirs. -- Sharon Salzberg
Once in a while, you have to let your mind just go. -- Sharon Salzberg
By experimenting with sympathetic joy, we break from the constricted world of individual struggle and see that joy exists in more places than we have yet imagined. -- Sharon Salzberg
Stealth Meditation If you start to feel overwhelmed, take a quick, centering moment - as short as following three breaths - to connect with a deeper sense of yourself. -- Sharon Salzberg
Love seems to open and expand us right down to the cellular level, while fear causes us to contract and withdraw into ourselves. -- Sharon Salzberg
The simple act of being completely attentive and present to another person is an act of love, and it fosters unshakeable well-being. It is happiness that isn't bound to a particular situation, happiness that can withstand change. -- Sharon Salzberg
I am totally amazed at the spread of interest in meditation. When I first came back from studying in India in 1974, I would be asked in social situations what I did. When I replied, "I teach meditation" they would frequently look at me as though to say "That is weird," and sort of sidle away. -- Sharon Salzberg
These are times when sympathetic joy comes naturally, but in a complex relationship the heart may not leap up so easily. -- Sharon Salzberg
By engaging in a delusive quest for happiness, we bring only suffering upon ourselves. In our frantic search for something to quench our thirst, we overlook the water all around us and drive ourselves into exile from our own lives. -- Sharon Salzberg
While happiness is an end in itself, it is also the state of mind we can have right now. -- Sharon Salzberg
Healing comes in many ways, and no one formula fits all. -- Sharon Salzberg
Every day seems to reveal a new piece of research about meditation, or new clinical applications of mindfulness or compassion practice, or new corporations or foundations or non-profits bringing mindfulness to work. -- Sharon Salzberg
Our minds tend to race ahead into the future or replay the past, but our bodies are always in the present moment. -- Sharon Salzberg
Even as we live with the knowledge that each day might be our last, we don't want to believe it. -- Sharon Salzberg
There is no conflict between loving others deeply and living mindfully. -- Sharon Salzberg
Intellectually, we may appreciate that loving ourselves would give us a firm foundation but for most of us this is a leap of logic, not a leap of the heart. -- Sharon Salzberg
Learning to treat ourselves lovingly may at first feel like a dangerous experiment. -- Sharon Salzberg
Mindfulness is the agent of our freedom. Through mindfulness we arrive at faith we grow in wisdom & we attain equanimity. -- Sharon Salzberg
When we develop our ability to love in one realm, we simultaneously nourish our ability in others, as long as we remain open to the flow of insight and compassion. -- Sharon Salzberg
We also try not to harm others verbally, seeing that our speech has tremendous power. Words do not just leave our mouths and disappear; they have great effects in this world. -- Sharon Salzberg
Patience doesn't mean making a pact with the devil of denial, ignoring our emotions and aspirations. It means being wholeheartedly engaged in the process that's unfolding, rather than ripping open a budding flower or demanding a caterpillar hurry up and get that chrysalis stage over with. -- Sharon Salzberg
Over time, offering loving kindness to all beings everywhere, including ourselves, unites us to one another so that we know that we can not go forward forgetting those left behind. Page 62 -- Sharon Salzberg
As a friend of mine told me about Real Happiness: you wrote this one in American. -- Sharon Salzberg
The more we practice sympathetic joy, the more we come to realize that the happiness we share with others is inseparable from our own happiness. -- Sharon Salzberg
Sometimes kindness is stepping aside, letting go of our need to be right & just being happy for someone. -- Sharon Salzberg
True happiness is born of letting go of what is unnecessary. -- Sharon Salzberg
Loving ourselves calls us to give up the illusion that we can control everything and focuses us on building our inner resource of resilience. -- Sharon Salzberg
If we have nothing material to give, we can offer our attention, our energy, our appreciation. The world needs us. It doesn't deplete us to give. -- Sharon Salzberg
The moment that we realize our attention has wandered is the magic moment of the practice, because that's the moment we have the chance to be really different. Instead of judging ourselves, and berating ourselves, and condemning ourselves, we can be gentle with ourselves. -- Sharon Salzberg
Many strong emotions are actually intricate tapestries woven of various strands. -- Sharon Salzberg
Kindness is really at the core of what it means to be and feel alive. -- Sharon Salzberg
Only when we start to distinguish reality from fantasy that we can humbly, with eyes wide open, forge loving and sustainable connections with others. -- Sharon Salzberg
An ordinary favor we do for someone or any compassionate reaching out may seem to be going nowhere at first, but may be planting a seed we can't see right now. Sometimes we need to just do the best we can and then trust in an unfolding we can't design or ordain. -- Sharon Salzberg
Be open to the possibility that there are other paths available to you in relating to yourself and to another. -- Sharon Salzberg
There is so much we just can't see or know right now, including precisely how our actions will ripple out. -- Sharon Salzberg
Because the development of inner calm & energy happens completely within & isn't dependent on another person or a particular situation, we begin to feel a resourcefulness and independence that is quite beautiful - and a huge relief. -- Sharon Salzberg
Shame weakens us. It can make us frightened to take on something new. We start to withdraw from whatever might give us pleasure, self-esteem, or a sense of our value. -- Sharon Salzberg
Mindfulness allows us to shift the angle on our story and to remember that we have the capacity to learn and change in ways that are productive, not self-defeating. -- Sharon Salzberg
What unites us as human beings is an urge for happiness which at heart is a yearning for union. -- Sharon Salzberg
Everyone's mind wanders, without doubt, and we always have to start over. Everyone resists or dislikes the thought of or is too tired to meditate at times, and we have to be able to begin again. -- Sharon Salzberg
We're capable of much more than mediocrity, much more than merely getting by in this world. -- Sharon Salzberg
I had a very turbulent and painful childhood, like many people. I left for college when I was 16 years old and up until that point I'd lived in five different family configurations. Each one ended or changed through a death or some terrible loss. -- Sharon Salzberg
Michelangelo was once asked how he would carve an elephant. He replied, I would take a large piece of stone and take away everything that was not the elephant. -- Sharon Salzberg
We can always begin again. -- Sharon Salzberg
Pain & suffering requires time, awareness, and an intentional practice of self-love to disentangle. -- Sharon Salzberg
To truly love ourselves, we must challenge our beliefs that we need to be different or better. -- Sharon Salzberg
Embracing what is We're conditioned to believe that painful feelings are "bad" and that pleasurable ones are "good." It's often easier - though not healthier - for us to avoid grief and sorrow, while only embracing sensations like happiness, confidence, and love. -- Sharon Salzberg
Feelings of apathy as they relate to our relationships often stem from insufficiently paying attention to those around us. -- Sharon Salzberg
A key barometer to help us weigh the rightness of our actions is self-respect. -- Sharon Salzberg
We can free ourselves from the old stories that have reduced us & allow real love for ourselves to blossom. -- Sharon Salzberg
If we fall, we don't need self-recrimination or blame or anger - we need a reawakening of our intention and a willingness to re-commit, to be whole-hearted once again. -- Sharon Salzberg
Restore your attention or bring it to a new level by dramatically slowing down whatever you're doing. -- Sharon Salzberg
Every time we forget to breathe or our minds wander or we're hijacked by feelings or sensations, we gently bring ourselves back to the breath, again and again. -- Sharon Salzberg
Protection, as we use the word in Buddhism, is actually wisdom, it's insight. Protection is seeing and knowing deeply that all things in our experience arise due to causes, due to conditions coming together in a certain way. -- Sharon Salzberg
You might have extensive bouts of thinking exceedingly nasty thoughts, but because you are relating to those thoughts with mindfulness and compassion, that's considered good meditation. -- Sharon Salzberg
Find a gap between a trigger event and our usual conditioned response to it and by using that pause to collect ourselves and shift our response -- Sharon Salzberg
At times when I am myself sitting at a retreat, and at the end I get into my car to drive away, I watch my hand move forward to turn on the radio. When I can be mindful, I notice the fact that I actually don't want in that moment to listen to the news or hear some music. -- Sharon Salzberg
Letting go is actually a healthy foundation upon which we can open up to real love - to giving, receiving, and experiencing it authentically and organically. -- Sharon Salzberg
It takes a special courage to challenge the rigid confines of our accustomed story. It's not easy to radically alter our views about where happiness comes from but it's eminently possible. -- Sharon Salzberg
relaxed perseverance. -- Sharon Salzberg
As human beings, we're capable of greatness of spirit, an ability to go beyond the circumstances we find ourselves in, to experience a vast sense of connection to all of life. -- Sharon Salzberg
Each of us has a genuine capacity for love, forgiveness, wisdom and compassion. Meditation awakens these qualities so that we can discover for ourselves the unique happiness that is our birthright. -- Sharon Salzberg
Continuous Partial Attention involves an artificial sense of constant crisis, of living in a 24/7, always-on world. It contributes to feeling stressed, overwhelmed, overstimulated, and unfulfilled; it compromises our ability to reflect, to make decisions, and to think creatively. Not -- Sharon Salzberg
Trying to impose our personal agenda on someone else's experience is the shadow side of love, while real love recognizes that life unfolds at its own pace. -- Sharon Salzberg
We are all too often told by someone that we are too old, too young, too different, too much the same, and those comments can be devastating. -- Sharon Salzberg
Forgiveness is a personal process that doesn't depend on us having direct contact with the people who have hurt us. -- Sharon Salzberg
A lack of real love for ourselves is one of the most constricting, painful conditions we can know. -- Sharon Salzberg
Identifying the source of our personal narratives helps us to release its negative aspects and re-frame it in ways that promote wholeness. -- Sharon Salzberg
Doing nothing means unplugging from the compulsion to always keep ourselves busy, the habit of shielding ourselves from certain feelings, the tension of trying to manipulate our experience before we even fully acknowledge what that experience is. -- Sharon Salzberg
The poet Rumi says: How long will we fill our pockets like children with dirt and stones? Let the world go. Holding it, we never know ourselves, never are airborne. -- Sharon Salzberg
When we bring deep awareness to whatever's bothering us, the same things might be happening, but we are able to relate to them differently. -- Sharon Salzberg
Keeping secrets is a consequential act for all involved. -- Sharon Salzberg
Integration arises from intimacy with our emotions and our bodies, as well as with our thoughts. -- Sharon Salzberg
It is so powerful when we can leave behind our ordinary identities, no longer think of ourselves primarily as a conductor, or writer, or salesclerk, and go to a supportive environment to deeply immerse in meditation practice. -- Sharon Salzberg
We find greater lightness & ease in our lives as we increasingly care for ourselves & other beings. -- Sharon Salzberg
Love and compassion don't at all have to make us weak, or lead us to losing discernment and vision. We just have to learn how to find them. And see, in truth, what they bring us. -- Sharon Salzberg
Loving kindness practice helps us move out of the terrain of our default narratives if they tend to be based on fear or disconnection. We become authors of brand-new stories about love. -- Sharon Salzberg
Kindness is not a fixed trait that we either have or lack, but more like a muscle that can be developed and strengthened. -- Sharon Salzberg
Self-love is an unfolding process that gains strength over time, not a goal with a fixed end point. -- Sharon Salzberg
Smiling at someone can have significant health consequences. -- Sharon Salzberg
Everyone Can Play is now the precept I live by. We may not agree with one another. We may argue. We may compete. But everybody gets to play, no matter what. We all deserve a shot at life. -- Sharon Salzberg
We need to redefine community and find a variety of ways of coming together and helping each other. -- Sharon Salzberg
Real Love may run on a lower voltage, but it's also more grounded & sustainable. -- Sharon Salzberg
Resilience is based on compassion for ourselves as well as compassion for others -- Sharon Salzberg
We think of ourselves as our titles or our jobs or our position in a family. We depend on being praised by others. But something happens when that praise is undermined. -- Sharon Salzberg
Loving-kindness and compassion are the basis for wise, powerful, sometimes gentle, and sometimes fierce actions that can really make a difference - in our own lives and those of others. -- Sharon Salzberg
We need the courage to learn from our past and not live in it. -- Sharon Salzberg
To sense which gifts to accept & which to leave behind is our path to discovering freedom. -- Sharon Salzberg
When we learn to respond to disappointments with acceptance, we give ourselves the space to realize that all our experiences - good and bad alike - are opportunities to learn and grow. -- Sharon Salzberg
We cannot simply forgive and forget, nor should we. -- Sharon Salzberg
The more we identify and acknowledge moments when we're unable to share in someone else's pleasure and ask ourselves whether another person's happiness truly jeopardizes our own, the more we pave the way for experiencing sympathetic joy -- Sharon Salzberg
In Buddhist teaching, ignorance is considered the fundamental cause of violence - ignorance ... about the separation of self and other ... about the consequences of our actions. -- Sharon Salzberg
The Buddha said that no true spiritual life is possible without a generous heart ... Generosity allies itself with an inner feeling of abundance - the feeling that we have enough to share. -- Sharon Salzberg
The heart is a generous muscle. -- Sharon Salzberg
We have to know ourselves to know where we end and another person begins, and we have to develop the skills to navigate the space between us. Or else we will seek wholeness through false means that honor neither us nor those we love. -- Sharon Salzberg
Our world opens up because we can let go. We can relinquish, and we are not afraid. We do not have to hold on. -- Sharon Salzberg
From the Buddhist point of view, it is true that emptiness is a characteristic of all of life - if we look carefully at any experience we will find transparency, insubstantiality, with no solid, unchanging core to our experience. But that does not mean that nothing matters. -- Sharon Salzberg
Although much of the work we do in committed relationships we do with our partners, sometimes it's necessary to start with ourselves. -- Sharon Salzberg
The heart contracts when our bodies are overcome by shame. -- Sharon Salzberg
Science tells us that love not only diminishes the experience of physical pain but can make us - and our beloveds - healthier. -- Sharon Salzberg
Let the breath lead the way. -- Sharon Salzberg
There is no 'thing' to let go of, but a concept, an idea of an ego that burdens us. As soon as we posit a 'thing' to let go of, we're in trouble. We need to change our view of reality, not attack a nonexistent entity. -- Sharon Salzberg
When we identify the thoughts that keep us from seeing others as they truly are we prepare the ground for real love. -- Sharon Salzberg
When emotions are long held and extremely complex, it sometimes takes years for them to enter fully into awareness. -- Sharon Salzberg
Love exists in itself, not relying on owning or being owned. -- Sharon Salzberg
Loving kindness is the spirit of friendship toward yourself and others. -- Sharon Salzberg
Wherever the responsibility lies, shame creates a solid and terrible feeling of unworthiness that resides in our bodies: the storehouse of the memories of our acts, real or imagined, and the secrets we keep about them. -- Sharon Salzberg
Mindfulness helps us see the addictive aspect of self-criticism - a repetitive cycle of flaying ourselves again and again, feeling the pain anew. -- Sharon Salzberg
Meditation teaches us to focus and to pay clear attention to our experiences and responses as they arise, and to observe them without judging them. -- Sharon Salzberg
It's tough to have an authentic relationship with awe in the age of awesome, a word that has become so overused as to be drained of its meaning. -- Sharon Salzberg
As we practice meditation we are bringing forth ease, presence, compassion, wisdom & trust. -- Sharon Salzberg
Let the power of intention lead the way. -- Sharon Salzberg
The key in letting go is practice. Each time we let go, we disentangle ourselves from our expectations and begin to experience things as they are. -- Sharon Salzberg
Though it may sound paradoxical, identifying our thoughts, emotions, and habitual patterns of behavior is the key to freedom & transformation. -- Sharon Salzberg
While you are meditating, if your mind wanders, gently bring it back to the present moment. -- Sharon Salzberg
The meditation traditions I started and have continued practicing have all emphasized inclusivity: anyone can do this who is interested. -- Sharon Salzberg
Thinking we are only supposed to have loving & compassionate feelings can be a terrible obstacle to spiritual practice. -- Sharon Salzberg
As we explore new ways of loving and being loved by others, we need to equip ourselves with open, pliant minds; we need to be willing to investigate, experiment, and evaluate as we approach a topic we thought we knew so much about. -- Sharon Salzberg
Perfection is fragile; interacting with something that seems perfect puts it in peril. -- Sharon Salzberg
The starting place for radical re-imagining of love is mindfulness. -- Sharon Salzberg
The skills available to us through mindfulness make it possible to bring love to our connections with others. -- Sharon Salzberg
We can't control what thoughts and emotions arise within us, nor can we control the universal truth that everything changes. But we can learn to step back and rest in the awareness of what's happening. That awareness can be our refuge. -- Sharon Salzberg
As we explore new ways of thinking, we need to be willing to investigate, experiment, take some risks with our attention, and stretch. -- Sharon Salzberg
Hatred does not help us alleviate our pain even in the slightest. -- Sharon Salzberg
The key to cultivating confidence in ourselves is understanding our right to make the truth our own. -- Sharon Salzberg
May the actions that I take toward the good, toward understanding myself, toward being more peaceful be of benefit to all beings everywhere. And -- Sharon Salzberg
Mindfulness helps us to set boundaries by revealing what makes us unhappy & what brings us peace. -- Sharon Salzberg
Each opportunity to interrupt the onslaught of thoughts and return to the object of meditation is, in fact, a moment of enlightenment -- Sharon Salzberg
The embodiment of kindness is often made difficult by our long ingrained patterns
of fear & jealousy. -- Sharon Salzberg
What's really transformative is our willingness to keep going, our openness to possibility, our patience, our effort, our humor, our growing self-knowledge, and the strength that we gain as we keep going. -- Sharon Salzberg
We can't give the truth to someone as an object, we can only point to it, inviting inspection. It is in that spirit that we can hear or read a teaching and then look at our own lives, at our own experiences to see whether anything might have been revealed about them. -- Sharon Salzberg
In those moments when we realize how much we cannot control, we can learn to let go. -- Sharon Salzberg
Forgiveness that is insincere, forced or premature can be more psychologically damaging than authentic bitterness & rage. -- Sharon Salzberg
Taking in another's criticism, even when it's offered out of love, requires courage. -- Sharon Salzberg
Compassion Judgment Loving-Kindness Compassion Is A Force Disconnection Self-Blame and Compassion Praise and Blame -- Sharon Salzberg
We come to meditation to learn how not to act out the habitual tendencies we generally live by - those actions that create suffering for ourselves and others, and get us into so much trouble. -- Sharon Salzberg
Forgiveness is the way we break the grip that long-held resentments have on our hearts. -- Sharon Salzberg
Awareness levels the playing field. We are all humans doing the best we can. -- Sharon Salzberg
There's no commodity we can take with us. There is only our lives, whether we live them wisely or whether we live them in ignorance. And this is everything. -- Sharon Salzberg
Mindfulness needs to not be judgmental to really be mindfulness, which means it needs a basis of loving kindness. -- Sharon Salzberg
So often we operate from ideas of love that don't fit our reality. -- Sharon Salzberg
When we believe a wounding story, our whole world is diminished. -- Sharon Salzberg
Our vision becomes very narrow when we need things to be a certain way and cannot accept things the way they actually are. -- Sharon Salzberg
Laughing at your pettiness probably works better than scolding yourself for it. -- Sharon Salzberg
By prizing heartfulness above faultlessness, we may reap more from our effort because we're more likely to be changed by it. -- Sharon Salzberg
Real Love for ourselves by definition includes every aspect of our lives - the good, the bad, the difficult, the challenging past, the uncertain future, as well as all the shameful, upsetting experiences and encounters we'd just as soon forget. -- Sharon Salzberg
In order to do anything about the suffering of the world we must have the strength to face it without turning away. -- Sharon Salzberg
We begin to cultivate real love for ourselves when we treat ourselves with compassion. -- Sharon Salzberg
I think we spend so much of our lives trying to pretend that we know what's going to happen next. In fact we don't. To recognize that we don't know even what will happen this afternoon and yet having the courage to move forward - that's one meaning of faith. -- Sharon Salzberg
Meditation trains the mind the way physical exercise strengthens the body. -- Sharon Salzberg
The combination of realizing our distinctiveness along with our unity is seeing interdependence. -- Sharon Salzberg
Resilience Practicing Self-Care To Avoid Burnout The Illusion of Control Patience and Perspective Resilience In The Face -- Sharon Salzberg
I think the associations people have with kindness are often things like meekness and sweetness and maybe sickly sweetness; whereas I do think of kindness as a force, as a power. -- Sharon Salzberg
A relationship is the union of two psychological systems. -- Sharon Salzberg
The practice of loving-kindness is about cultivating love as a trans-formative strength, -- Sharon Salzberg
The wholesome pursuit of excellence feels quite different from perfectionism. -- Sharon Salzberg
Meditation is not about what's happening, it is about how we're relating to what's happening. -- Sharon Salzberg
When we truly allow ourselves to feel our own pain, over time it comes to seem less personal. We start to recognize that what we've perceived as our pain is, at a deeper level, the pain inherent in human existence. -- Sharon Salzberg
Living in a story of a limited self - to any degree - is not love. -- Sharon Salzberg
Seeking is endless. It never comes to a state of rest; it never ceases. -- Sharon Salzberg
When we don't tell those we love about what's really going on or listen carefully to what they have to say, we tend to fill in the blanks with stories. -- Sharon Salzberg
You are a person worthy of love. You don't have to do anything to prove that. -- Sharon Salzberg
Vulnerability should be the thing that brings us closer than anything because we all share that. -- Sharon Salzberg
Grief helps us to relinquish the illusion that the past could be different from what it was. -- Sharon Salzberg
We can discover the capacity of the mind to be aware, to love, to begin again -- Sharon Salzberg
When we practice metta, we open continuously to the truth of our actual experience, changing our relationship to life. -- Sharon Salzberg
Training our mind through meditation does not mean forcibly subjugating it or beating it into shape. -- Sharon Salzberg
The paradigm for our relationships is formed from our earliest experiences and is actually hardwired into our neurological and emotional network. -- Sharon Salzberg
For any marginalized group to change the story that society tells about them takes courage and perseverance. -- Sharon Salzberg
Although love is often depicted as starry-eyed and sweet, love for the self is made of tougher stuff. -- Sharon Salzberg
When you recognize and reflect on even one good thing about yourself, you are building a bridge to a place of kindness and caring. -- Sharon Salzberg
I call myself a meditation teacher rather than a spiritual teacher. -- Sharon Salzberg
To imagine the way we think is the singular causative agent of all we go through is to practice cruelty toward ourselves. -- Sharon Salzberg
Just as a prism refracts light differently when you change its angle, each experience of love illuminates love in new ways, drawing from an infinite palette of patterns and hues. -- Sharon Salzberg
It is taught, we too can be enlightened, every one of us. We can be completely freed from the bonds of limitation and conditioned confusion through our own endeavor, inspiration, effort and development. There is a path, and we can traverse it. -- Sharon Salzberg
Mindfulness isn't difficult, we just need to remember to do it. -- Sharon Salzberg
We don't need any sort of religious orientation to lead a life that is ethical, compassionate & kind. -- Sharon Salzberg
Sometimes people don't trust the force of kindness. They think love or compassion or kindness will make you weak and kind of stupid and people will take advantage of you; you won't stand up for other people. -- Sharon Salzberg
What you learn about pain in formal meditation can help you relate to it in your daily life. -- Sharon Salzberg
The first time a meditation teacher encouraged me to practice mindfulness - which -- Sharon Salzberg
We are born ready to love and be loved. It is our birthright. -- Sharon Salzberg
We long for permanence but everything in the known universe is transient. That's a fact but one we fight. -- Sharon Salzberg
The good news is that opportunities for love enter our lives unpredictably, whether or not we've perfected self-compassion or befriended our inner critic. -- Sharon Salzberg
We apply our effort to be mindful, to be aware in this very moment, right here and now, and we bring a very wholehearted effort to it. This brings concentration. It is this power of concentration that we use to cut through the world of surface appearances to get to a much deeper reality. -- Sharon Salzberg
Whatever life presents us, our response can be an expression of our compassion. -- Sharon Salzberg
My earliest experiences in meditation were in a context of intensive retreats. -- Sharon Salzberg
When we don't allow setbacks to defeat us, they become opportunities for learning, acceptance, flexibility, and patience. -- Sharon Salzberg
I've spent quite a bit of my life as a meditation teacher and writer commending the strengths of love and compassion. -- Sharon Salzberg
I've been through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened, Mark Twain once said. -- Sharon Salzberg
The fulfillment we have in owning, in desiring, is temporary and illusory, because there is nothing at all we can have that we will not lose eventually. And so there is always fear. -- Sharon Salzberg
We all want to be happy. We need to expand the notion of what that means, to make it bigger and wiser. -- Sharon Salzberg
Even on the spiritual path, we have things we'll tend to cover up or be in denial about. -- Sharon Salzberg
The difference between misery and happiness depends on what we do with our attention. -- Sharon Salzberg
Like water poured from one vessel to another, metta flows freely, taking the shape of each situation without changing its essence. -- Sharon Salzberg
When we constantly hear that we should be smarter, better connected, more productive, wealthier - it takes real courage to claim the time and space to follow the currents of our talents, our aspirations, and our hearts, which may lead in a very different direction. -- Sharon Salzberg
Love as a power can go anywhere. It isn't sentimental. It doesn't have to be pretty, yet it doesn't deny pain. -- Sharon Salzberg
The most common response I hear when I tell people I teach meditation is, "I'm so stressed out. I could use some of that!" A response I also sometimes hear, which amuses me a lot is, "My partner should really meet you!" -- Sharon Salzberg
Buddha first taught metta meditation as an antidote: as a way of surmounting terrible fear when it arises. -- Sharon Salzberg
Meditation may be done in silence & stillness, by using voice & sound, or by engaging the body in movement. All forms emphasize the training of attention. -- Sharon Salzberg
Mindfulness is so much wiser and more robust than our inner critic. -- Sharon Salzberg
WHATEVER TAKES US to our edge, to our outer limits, leads us to the heart of life's mystery, and there we find faith. -- Sharon Salzberg
Meditation is a microcosm, a model, a mirror. The skills we practice when we sit are transferable to the rest of our lives. -- Sharon Salzberg
Mindfulness, also called wise attention, helps us see what we're adding to our experiences, not only during meditation sessions but also elsewhere. -- Sharon Salzberg
We can use meditation as a way to experiment with new ways of relating to ourselves, even our uncomfortable thoughts. -- Sharon Salzberg
Real love allows for failure and suffering. -- Sharon Salzberg
Compassion grows in us when we know how the energy of love is available all around us. -- Sharon Salzberg
It is sometimes difficult to view compassion and loving kindness as the strengths they are. -- Sharon Salzberg
You don't have to love yourself unconditionally before you can give or receive real love. -- Sharon Salzberg
There is a sentiment common among most of us when it comes to love - letting go can feel scary. -- Sharon Salzberg
Faith is not a commodity that you either have or don't have enough of, or the right kind of. It's an ongoing process. The opposite of faith is despair. -- Sharon Salzberg
We cannot instantaneously force ourselves to forgive - and forgiveness happens at a different pace for everyone and is dependent on the particulars of any given situation. -- Sharon Salzberg
Causing harm is never just a one-way street. -- Sharon Salzberg
Our path, our sense of spirituality demands great earnestness, dedication, sincerity & continuity. -- Sharon Salzberg
We need the compassion and the courage to change the conditions that support our suffering. Those conditions are things like ignorance, bitterness, negligence, clinging, and holding on. -- Sharon Salzberg
What arises in our experience is much less important than how we relate to what arises in our experience. -- Sharon Salzberg
One of the most powerful aspects of delusion, or ignorance, is the belief that what we do does not really matter. -- Sharon Salzberg
We learn and grow and are transformed not so much by what we do but by why and how we do it. -- Sharon Salzberg
Mindfulness can play a big role in transforming our experience with pain & other difficulties; it allows us to recognize the authenticity of the distress & yet not be overwhelmed by it. -- Sharon Salzberg
Meditation isn't about what's happening; it's about how you relate to what's happening. -- Sharon Salzberg
look at the world with quiet eyes. -- Sharon Salzberg
That's life: starting over, one breath at a time. -- Sharon Salzberg
All beings want to be happy, yet so very few know how. It is out of ignorance that any of us cause suffering, for ourselves or for others -- Sharon Salzberg
You don't have to believe anything, adopt a dogma in order to learn how to meditate. -- Sharon Salzberg
Meditation is essentially training our attention so that we can be more aware - not only of our own inner workings but also of what's happening around us in the here & now. -- Sharon Salzberg
It is in the act of offering our hearts in faith that something in us transforms ... proclaiming that we no longer stand on the sidelines but are leaping directly into the center of our lives, our truth, our full potential. -- Sharon Salzberg
Clinging to our ideas of perfection isolates us from life and is a barrier. -- Sharon Salzberg
What comes up is not nearly as important as how you relate to what comes up. -- Sharon Salzberg
Compassion allows us to bear witness to suffering, whether it is in ourselves or others, without fear; it allows us to name injustice without hesitation, to act strongly, with all the skill at our disposal. -- Sharon Salzberg
I will love myself as long as I never make a mistake. -- Sharon Salzberg
Taking responsibility for oneself is by definition an act of kindness. -- Sharon Salzberg
The personal power of being confident and clear about our actions and saying what we know without holding back is described in the texts as 'the lions roar. -- Sharon Salzberg
Everyone we interact with has the capacity to surprise us in an infinite number of ways. What can first open us up to each of our innate capacities for love is merely to recognize that. -- Sharon Salzberg
In our own lives and in our communities, we need to find a way to include others rather than exclude them. We need to find a way to allow our pain and suffering, individually and collectively. -- Sharon Salzberg
It's important to be aware of how multitasking can stimulate us into mindlessness, giving the illusion of productivity while stealing our focus and harming performance. "When you are walking, walk. When you are sitting, sit," is ancient wisdom. -- Sharon Salzberg
With attachment all that seems to exist is just me & that object I desire. -- Sharon Salzberg
May my practice be dedicated to your well-being. -- Sharon Salzberg
We so often in our lives serve as mirrors for one another. We look to others to find out if we ourselves are lovable; we look to others to find out if we are capable of feeling love; we look to others for a reflection of our innate radiance. -- Sharon Salzberg
We often get caught up in our own reactions and forget the vulnerability of the person in front of us. -- Sharon Salzberg
Compassion isn't morose; it's something replenishing and opening; that's why it makes us happy. -- Sharon Salzberg
With every action we take, we send love or suffering into the web that connects us. -- Sharon Salzberg
We use mindfulness to observe the way we cling to pleasant experiences & push away unpleasant ones. -- Sharon Salzberg
Voting is like alchemy - taking an abstract value and breathing life into it. -- Sharon Salzberg
Generosity has such power because it is characterized by the inner quality of letting go or relinquishing. -- Sharon Salzberg
There are many different ways to practice meditation; it's good to experiment until you find one that seems to suit you. -- Sharon Salzberg
To offer our hearts in faith means recognizing that our hearts are worth something, that we ourselves, in our deepest and truest nature, are of value. -- Sharon Salzberg
With the practice of meditation we can develop this ability to more fully love
ourselves and to more consistently love others. -- Sharon Salzberg
What we learn in meditation, we can apply to all other realms of our lives. -- Sharon Salzberg
Integrity Intention Doing Better Moral Distress The Moral Demands of Compassionate Health Care Authenticity What Is Our Work? -- Sharon Salzberg
Rapture is the gateway to nirvana. -- Sharon Salzberg
Through meditation we come to know that we are dying & being reborn in every moment. -- Sharon Salzberg
Equanimity's strength derives from a combination of understanding and trust. It is based on understanding that the conflict and frustration we feel when we can't control the world doesn't come from our inability to do so but rather from the fact that we are trying to control the uncontrollable. -- Sharon Salzberg
By practicing meditation we establish love, compassion, sympathetic joy & equanimity as our home. -- Sharon Salzberg
We live in a network of inter connectivity. -- Sharon Salzberg
Love is a living capacity within us that is always present, even when we don't sense it. -- Sharon Salzberg
Each decision we make, each action we take, is born out of an intention. -- Sharon Salzberg
Open Awareness The Angle of Vision Leadership Openness Getting Out of The Way Possibilities MEDITATION: -- Sharon Salzberg
Our senses are often the gateway to our stories. -- Sharon Salzberg
Develop a mind so filled with love that it resembles space. -- Sharon Salzberg
Love simply, perpetually exists and that it's a matter of psychic housekeeping to make room for it. -- Sharon Salzberg
The mind thinks thoughts that we don't plan. It's not as if we say, 'At 9:10 I'm going to be filled with self-hatred. -- Sharon Salzberg
Concentration Attention Multitasking Boredom Procrastination -- Sharon Salzberg
Instead of catching ourselves after we first felt angry, we develop a visceral sensitivity to what's happening within us in the moment & through mindfulness, we can shape our reaction right away. -- Sharon Salzberg
May I be safe.
May I be happy.
May I be healthy.
May I live with ease. -- Sharon Salzberg
We know that people who consistently meditate have a singular ability to cultivate positive emotions, retain emotional stability, and engage in mindful behavior, -- Sharon Salzberg
Meditation is a cyclical process that defies analysis, but demands acceptance. -- Sharon Salzberg
Having' something makes us think we can control it. -- Sharon Salzberg
It's affirming that we can look at any experience from the fullness of our being and get past the shame we carry. -- Sharon Salzberg
Effort is the unconstrained willingness to persevere through difficulty. -- Sharon Salzberg
Voting is the expression of our commitment to ourselves, one another, this country and this world. -- Sharon Salzberg
