Sharon Salzberg Quotes - Page 2

Forgiveness is a process, an admittedly difficult one that often can feel like a rigorous spiritual practice.
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
Telling the story, acknowledging what has happened and how you feel, is often a necessary part of forgiveness.
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
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
Every single moment is expressive of the truth of our lives when we know how to look.
Sharon Salzberg
Through meditation we come to know that we are dying & being reborn in every moment.
Sharon Salzberg
Meditation is a cyclical process that defies analysis, but demands acceptance.
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
Vulnerability in the face of constant change is what we share, whatever our present condition.
Sharon Salzberg
Our path, our sense of spirituality demands great earnestness, dedication, sincerity & continuity.
Sharon Salzberg
Meditation trains the mind the way physical exercise strengthens the body.
Sharon Salzberg
When we don’t allow setbacks to defeat us, they become opportunities for learning, acceptance, flexibility, and patience.
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
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
We live in a network of inter connectivity.
Sharon Salzberg
Love exists in itself, not relying on owning or being owned.
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
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
The manifestation of the free mind is said to be lovingkindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity.
Sharon Salzberg
Contemplating the goodness within ourselves is a classical meditation, done to bring light, joy, and rapture to the mind. In contemporary times this practice might be considered rather embarrassing, because so often the emphasis is on all the unfortunate things we have done, all the disturbing mistakes we have made. Yet this classical reflection is not a way of increasing conceit. It is rather a commitment to our own happiness, seeing our happiness as the basis for intimacy with all of life. It fills us with joy and love for ourselves and a great deal of self-respect. Significantly, when we do metta practice, we begin by directing metta toward ourselves. This is the essential foundation for being able to offer genuine love to 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
Mindfulness is so much wiser and more robust than our inner critic.
Sharon Salzberg
Our senses are often the gateway to our stories.
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
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
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 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
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 can see your thoughts and emotions arise & create space for them even if they are uncomfortable.
Sharon Salzberg
The breath is the first tool for opening the space between the story you tell yourself about love.
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
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
Mindfulness practice helps create space between our actual experiences and the reflexive stories we tend to tell about them.
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
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
The heart contracts when our bodies are overcome by shame.
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
To imagine the way we think is the singular causative agent of all we go through is to practice cruelty toward ourselves.
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
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
We can use meditation as a way to experiment with new ways of relating to ourselves, even our uncomfortable thoughts.
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
Paying attention to the ethical implications of our choices has never been more pressing—or more complicated—than it is today.
Sharon Salzberg
Causing harm is never just a one-way street.
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
So often, fear keeps us from being able to say yes to love—perhaps our greatest challenge as human beings.
Sharon Salzberg
Learning to treat ourselves lovingly may at first feel like a dangerous experiment.
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 journey to loving ourselves doesn’t mean we like everything.
Sharon Salzberg
When we direct a lot of hostile energy toward the inner critic, we enter into a losing battle.
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
When we relate to ourselves with loving kindness, perfectionism naturally drops away.
Sharon Salzberg
Wholehearted acceptance is a basic element of love, starting with love for ourselves, and a gateway to joy. Through the practices of loving kindness and self-compassion, we can learn to love our flawed and imperfect selves. And in those moments of vulnerability, we open our hearts to connect with each other, as well. We are not perfect, but we are enough.
Sharon Salzberg
When we contemplate the miracle of embodied life, we begin to partner with our bodies in a kinder way.
Sharon Salzberg
If we truly loved ourselves, we’d never harm another. That is a truly revolutionary, celebratory mode of self-care.
Sharon Salzberg
The more we practice mindfulness, the more alert we become to the cost of keeping secrets.
Sharon Salzberg
We’re capable of much more than mediocrity, much more than merely getting by in this world.
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
Our minds tend to race ahead into the future or replay the past, but our bodies are always in the present moment.
Sharon Salzberg