Sharon Salzberg Quotes - Page 4

When we are willing to explore our own experiences, we open the doorway to deeper connection and intimacy.
Sharon Salzberg
In more ways than any of us can name, love is wrapped up with the idea of expectation.
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
Mindfulness may help you gain insight into your role in conflicts with others, it won’t single-highhandedly help you resolve them.
Sharon Salzberg
The heart is a generous muscle.
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
Laughing at your pettiness probably works better than scolding yourself for it.
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
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
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
There is no conflict between loving others deeply and living mindfully.
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
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
Love is defined by difficult acts of human compassion & generosity.
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
Love simply, perpetually exists and that it’s a matter of psychic housekeeping to make room for it.
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
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
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
Forgiveness is the way we break the grip that long-held resentments have on our hearts.
Sharon Salzberg
Healing comes in many ways, and no one formula fits all.
Sharon Salzberg
Letting go is an inside job, something only we can do for ourselves.
Sharon Salzberg
Taking responsibility for oneself is by definition an act of kindness.
Sharon Salzberg
Equanimity can be hard to talk about.
Sharon Salzberg
Our can-do culture has made many of us believe that we should always be self-sufficient. Somewhere along the way, we also got the message that asking for help is a sign of weakness. We often forget that we’re interdependent creatures whose very existence depends on the kindness of others, including—with a bow to Tennessee Williams—strangers.
Sharon Salzberg
There are an incalculable—even infinite—number of situations in which we can practice forgiveness. Expecting it to be a singular action—motivated by the sheer imperative to move on and forget—can be more damaging than the original feelings of anger. Accepting forgiveness as pluralistic and as an ongoing, individualized process opens us up to realize the role that our own needs play in conflict resolution.
Sharon Salzberg
Loving kindness is the practice of offering to oneself and others wishes to be happy, peaceful, healthy, strong
Sharon Salzberg
We begin to cultivate real love for ourselves when we treat ourselves with compassion.
Sharon Salzberg
A lack of real love for ourselves is one of the most constricting, painful conditions we can know.
Sharon Salzberg
When we pay attention to sensations in our bodies, we can feel that love is the energetic opposite of fear.
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
There is a sentiment common among most of us when it comes to love—letting go can feel scary.
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
Science tells us that love not only diminishes the experience of physical pain but can make us—and our beloveds—healthier.
Sharon Salzberg
We long for permanence but everything in the known universe is transient. That’s a fact but one we fight.
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
Science tells us that love not only diminishes the experience of physical pain but can make us—and our beloveds—healthier.
Sharon Salzberg
We long for permanence but everything in the known universe is transient. That’s a fact but one we fight.
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
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
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
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
Living in a story of a limited self—to any degree—is not love.
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
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
When we experience inner impoverishment, love for another too easily becomes hunger: for reassurance, for acclaim, for affirmation of our worth.
Sharon Salzberg
Love is a living capacity within us that is always present, even when we don’t sense it.
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
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
Real Love may run on a lower voltage, but it’s also more grounded & sustainable.
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
Buddhist teachings discourage us from clinging and grasping to those we hold dear, and from trying to control the people or the relationship. What’s more, we’re encouraged to accept the impermanence of all things: the flower that blooms today will be gone tomorrow, the objects we possess will break or fade or lose their utility, our relationships will change, life will end.
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
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
Be open to the possibility that there are other paths available to you in relating to yourself and to another.
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
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
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
How we traverse the space between us when conflict arises has a profound effect on the health and longevity of our relationships.
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