Sharon Salzberg Quotes

It is a state of peace to be able to accept things as they are. This is to be at home in our own lives. We see that this universe is much too big to hold on to, but it is the perfect size for letting go. Our hearts and minds become that big, and we can actually let go. This is the gift of equanimity.
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
Many strong emotions are actually intricate tapestries woven of various strands.
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
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 those moments when we realize how much we cannot control, we can learn to let go.
Sharon Salzberg
Fearful of wasting a second, we hoard time as if it were money.
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
As a friend of mine told me about Real Happiness: you wrote this one in American.
Sharon Salzberg
Rather than trying to control what can never be controlled, we can find a sense of security in being able to meet what is actually happening. This is allowing for the mystery of things: not judging but rather cultivating a balance of mind that can receive what is happening, whatever it is. This acceptance is the source of our safety and confidence.When we feel unhappiness or pain, it is not a sign that things have gone terribly wrong or that we have done something wrong by not being able to control the circumstances. Pain and pleasure are constantly coming and going, and yet we can be happy. When we allow for the mystery , sometimes we can discover that right in the heart of a very difficult time, right in the midst of a painful situation, there is freedom. In those moments when we realize how much we cannot control, we can learn to let go. As we begin to understand this, we move from a mode of struggling to control what comes into our lives into a mode of simply wishing to truly connect with what is. This is a radical shift in worldview.
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
The overarching practice of letting go is also one of gaining resilience and insight.
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
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
To reteach a thing its loveliness is the nature of metta. Through lovingkindness, everyone & everything can flower again from within.
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
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
The combination of realizing our distinctiveness along with our unity is seeing interdependence.
Sharon Salzberg
In one of the verses of Lal Ded, or Lalla, a fourteenth-century mystic from Kashmir, Lalla says: “At the end of a crazy-moon night the love of God rose. I said “It’s me, Lalla.”“It’s me, Lalla,” becomes “It’s me…whoever you are,” proclaiming that we no longer stand on the sidelines but are leaping directly into the center of our lives, our truth, our full potential. No one can take that leap for us; and no one has to. This is our journey of faith.
Sharon Salzberg
Concepts such as loving kindness should never be used as weapons against our real feelings.
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
Hatred does not help us alleviate our pain even in the slightest.
Sharon Salzberg
If we look at the force of anger, we can, in fact, discover many positive aspects in it. Anger is not a passive, complacent state. It has incredible energy. Anger can impel us to let go of ways we may be inappropriately defined by the needs of others; it can teach us to say no. In this way it also serves our integrity, because anger can motivate us to turn from the demands of the outer world to the nascent voice of our inner world. It is a way to set boundaries and to challenge injustice at every level. Anger will not take things for granted or simply accept them mindlessly.Anger also has the ability to cut through surface appearances; it does not just stay on a superficial level. It is very critical; it is very demanding. Anger has the power to pierce through the obvious to things that are more hidden. This is why anger may be transmuted to wisdom. By nature, anger has characteristics in common with wisdom.Nevertheless, the unskillful aspects of anger are immense, and they far outweigh the positive aspects.
Sharon Salzberg
Anger often makes us hurt ourselves more than any enemy.
Sharon Salzberg
Consider how the sky is unharmed by the clouds that pass through it, whether they are light and fluffy-looking or dark and formidable. A mountain is not moved by the winds blowing over it, whether gentle or fierce. The ocean is not destroyed by the waves moving on its surface, whether high or low. In just that way, no matter what we experience, some aspect of ourselves remains unharmed. This is the innate happiness of awareness.
Sharon Salzberg
When we believe a wounding story, our whole world is diminished.
Sharon Salzberg
Pain & suffering requires time, awareness, and an intentional practice of self-love to disentangle.
Sharon Salzberg
Self-love is an unfolding process that gains strength over time, not a goal with a fixed end point.
Sharon Salzberg
We truly can reconfigure how we see ourselves and reclaim the love for ourselves that we’re innately capable of.
Sharon Salzberg
Although love is often depicted as starry-eyed and sweet, love for the self is made of tougher stuff.
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
Integration arises from intimacy with our emotions and our bodies, as well as with our thoughts.
Sharon Salzberg
Compassion grows in us when we know how the energy of love is available all around us.
Sharon Salzberg
We can discover the capacity of the mind to be aware, to love, to begin again
Sharon Salzberg
Sometimes kindness is stepping aside, letting go of our need to be right & just being happy for someone.
Sharon Salzberg
The key to cultivating confidence in ourselves is understanding our right to make the truth our own.
Sharon Salzberg
While happiness is an end in itself, it is also the state of mind we can have right now.
Sharon Salzberg
Mindfulness is the agent of our freedom. Through mindfulness we arrive at faith we grow in wisdom & we attain equanimity.
Sharon Salzberg
Thinking we are only supposed to have loving & compassionate feelings can be a terrible obstacle to spiritual practice.
Sharon Salzberg
Forgiveness that is insincere, forced or premature can be more psychologically damaging than authentic bitterness & rage.
Sharon Salzberg
To sense which gifts to accept & which to leave behind is our path to discovering freedom.
Sharon Salzberg
Mindfulness helps us to set boundaries by revealing what makes us unhappy & what brings us peace.
Sharon Salzberg
Being happy at work is possible for all of us, anytime & anywhere, with open eyes and a caring heart
Sharon Salzberg
Distraction wastes our energy, concentration restores it.
Sharon Salzberg
When we experience dissatisfaction at work, which everyone does we can use our disappointment as fuel to wake up.
Sharon Salzberg
Not everyone wants to take up meditation, but most people can feel an alignment with values like mutual respect, insightful investigation, listening to one another.Meditation is a way to help those values become real in day-to-day life, helping people to understand themselves more and more and have a way to not get lost in old patterns.
Sharon Salzberg
Meditation is not about what's happening, it is about how we're relating to what's happening.
Sharon Salzberg
We have the power to improve our work lives immeasurably through awareness, compassion, patience & ingenuity.
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
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
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
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
The first step toward feeling compassion for others is to set the intention to try it out.
Sharon Salzberg
The embodiment of kindness is often made difficult by our long ingrained patternsof fear & jealousy.
Sharon Salzberg
We find greater lightness & ease in our lives as we increasingly care for ourselves & other beings.
Sharon Salzberg
Once someone appears to us primarily as an object, kindness has no place to root.
Sharon Salzberg
We don’t need any sort of religious orientation to lead a life that is ethical, compassionate & kind.
Sharon Salzberg
We often get caught up in our own reactions and forget the vulnerability of the person in front of us.
Sharon Salzberg
We can free ourselves from the old stories that have reduced us & allow real love for ourselves to blossom.
Sharon Salzberg
Grief helps us to relinquish the illusion that the past could be different from what it was.
Sharon Salzberg