Sharon Salzberg Quotes - Page 3

The skills available to us through mindfulness make it possible to bring love to our connections with others.
Sharon Salzberg
What we learn in meditation, we can apply to all other realms of our lives.
Sharon Salzberg
Keeping secrets is a consequential act for all involved.
Sharon Salzberg
There’s no denying that it takes effort to set the intention to see our fundamental connected-ness with others.
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
We’re in charge of our own forgiveness, and the process takes time, patience, and intention.
Sharon Salzberg
Kindness is really at the core of what it means to be and feel alive.
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
Buddha first taught metta meditation as an antidote: as a way of surmounting terrible fear when it arises.
Sharon Salzberg
To relinquish the futile effort to control change is one of the strengthening forces of true detachment & thus true love.
Sharon Salzberg
With attachment all that seems to exist is just me & that object I desire.
Sharon Salzberg
Metta is the ability to embrace all parts of ourselves, as well as all parts of the world. Practicing metta illuminates our inner integrity because it relieves us of the need to deny different aspects of ourselves. We can open to everything with the healing force of love. When we feel love, our mind is expansive and open enough to include the entirety of life in full awareness, both its pleasures and its pains, we feel neither betrayed by pain or overcome by it, and thus we can contact that which is undamaged within us regardless of the situation. Metta sees truly that our integrity is inviolate, no matter what our life situation may be.
Sharon Salzberg
Effort is the unconstrained willingness to persevere through difficulty.
Sharon Salzberg
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
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
With the practice of meditation we can develop this ability to more fully love ourselves and to more consistently love others.
Sharon Salzberg
We use mindfulness to observe the way we cling to pleasant experiences & push away unpleasant ones.
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
Let the breath lead the way.
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
Meditation is the ultimate mobile device; you can use it anywhere, anytime, unobtrusively.
Sharon Salzberg
Restore your attention or bring it to a new level by dramatically slowing down whatever you're doing.
Sharon Salzberg
Asking questions is an opportunity for creativity and personal expression, both for the person asking and the person answering.
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
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
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
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
The practice of loving-kindness is about cultivating love as a trans-formative strength,
Sharon Salzberg
Our practice rather than being about killing the ego is about simply discovering our true nature.
Sharon Salzberg
When emotions are long held and extremely complex, it sometimes takes years for them to enter fully into awareness.
Sharon Salzberg
When we practice metta, we open continuously to the truth of our actual experience, changing our relationship to life.
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
Like water poured from one vessel to another, metta flows freely, taking the shape of each situation without changing its essence.
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
Mindfulness isn't difficult, we just need to remember to do it.
Sharon Salzberg
The simple act of being completely attentive & present to another person is an act of love, and it fosters unshakeable well-being.
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
In reality, love is fluid; it’s a verb, not a noun.
Sharon Salzberg
At times, reality is love’s great challenge. When our old stories and dreams are shattered, our first instinct may be to resist, deny, or cling to the way things were. But if we loosen our grip, often what fills the space is a tender forgiveness and the potential for a new and different kind of love.
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
Taking in another’s criticism, even when it’s offered out of love, requires courage.
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
You are a person worthy of love. You don’t have to do anything to prove that.
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
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
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
By practicing meditation we establish love, compassion, sympathetic joy & equanimity as our home.
Sharon Salzberg
Awareness levels the playing field. We are all humans doing the best we can.
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
No matter what we think we should do, I don’t think you can coerce yourself into loving your neighbor—or your boss—when you can’t stand him. But if you try to understand your feelings of dislike with mindfulness and compassion, being sure not to forget self-compassion, you create the possibility for change.
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
Though it may sound paradoxical, identifying our thoughts, emotions, and habitual patterns of behavior is the key to freedom & transformation.
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
All of our actions can signify self-love or self-sabotage
Sharon Salzberg
We are born ready to love and be loved. It is our birthright.
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
When we identify the thoughts that keep us from seeing others as they truly are we prepare the ground for real love.
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
Setting the intention to practice kindness toward one’s partner or family members or friends does not preclude getting angry or upset.
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