Quotes by Meditation Teachers - Page 2

Inner Peace can be seen as the ultimate benefit of practicing patience.
Allan Lokos
You actions are your only true belongings.
Allan Lokos
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
Just watch this moment, without trying to change it at all. What is happening? What do you feel? What do you see? What do you hear?
Jon Kabat-Zinn
This is it.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
The combination of realizing our distinctiveness along with our unity is seeing interdependence.
Sharon Salzberg
September 8Today I pray for the knowledge of God’s will for me and then follow my inner guidance. I choose to make my thoughts and actions align with peace and love.
Ruth Fishel
Note that this journey is uniquely yours, no one else's. So the path has to be your own. You cannot imitate somebody else's journey and still be true to yourself. Are you prepared to honor your uniqueness in this way?
Jon Kabat-Zinn
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
When we are depleted our giving is empty. Today I take a moment to recharge, fill up with love for my life and all of its character so that I may give from a place of overflowing.
Lisa Wimberger
You fill a bucket drop by drop. You clear your mind thought by thought. You heal yourself moment by moment. Today I make one drop, clear one thought, and get present to one moment. And then I do it again.
Lisa Wimberger
One way to think of this dignity is to equate when you are on the path with unraveling a ball of yarn. You have wound your sense of self so tightly that it's hard to be anything other than you, a big ball of yarn. That's just who you are, not string, or threads, but a ball of yarn.
Lodro Rinzler
There is seldom any rational reason for having regreats about past deeds or events. Because the past does not exist in any other way than in your memory.When you recognise this lack of reality, you can be calm.
Paul Wilson
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
Patience is an ever present alternative to the mind's endemic restlessness and impatience. Scratch the surface of impatience and what you will find lying beneath it, subtly or not so subtly, is anger. It's the strong energy of not wanting things to be the way they are and blaming someone (often yourself) or something for it. This doesn't mean you can't hurry when you have to. It is possible even to hurry patiently, mindfully, moving fast because you have chosen to.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
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
Concentration is a cornerstone of mindfulness practice. Your mindfulness will only be as robust as the capacity of your mind to be calm and stable. Without calmness, the mirror of mindfulness will have an agitated and choppy surface and will not be able to reflect things with any accuracy.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
Mindfulness is a way of befriending ourselves and our experience.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
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
Patience is an action and a skill to be cultivated. It actually solves more problems that most other actions.
John Bruna
The awareness is not part of the darkness or the pain; it holds the pain, and knows it, so it has to be more fundamental, and closer to what is healthy and strong and golden within you.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
Symptoms of illness and distress, plus your feelings about them, can be viewed as messengers coming to tell you something important about your body or about your mind. In the old days, if a king didn't like the message he was given, he would sometimes have the messenger killed. This is tantamount to suppressing your symptoms or your feelings because they are unwanted. Killing the messenger and denying the message or raging against it are not intelligent ways of approaching healing. The one thing we don't want to do is to ignore or rupture the essential connections that can complete relevant feedback loops and restore self-regulation and balance. Our real challenge when we have symptoms is to see if we can listen to their message and really hear them and take them to heart, that is, make the connection fully.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
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
In Buddhism we would say that you are lazy... Despising yourself, thinking you are no good, saying 'I can't do this.' This is the mind of weakness. You must work to overcome it .
David Michie
When you look back at the painful and difficult events of your life, you find that they were the times of your greatest personal growth. The challenges of our lives provide us the opportunity to develop our highest potentials.
John Bruna
To let go means to give up coercing, resisting, or struggling, in exchange for something more powerful and wholesome which comes out of allowing things to be as they are without getting caught up in your attraction to or rejection of them, in the intrinsic stickiness of wanting, of liking and disliking.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
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
The only thing that separates the person you are from the person you want to be are the actions you take.
John Bruna
We all have limitations. They are worth befriending. They teach us a lot. They can show us what we most need to pay attention to and honor. They become our cutting edge for learning and growing and gentling ourselves into the present moment as it is.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
,,, let go of the real source of our unhappiness: our own self-obsession. Stress, loneliness, pessimism, financial worries, and unhappy relationships all have one thing in common: they're all about "me".
David Michie
When we don't automatically take them (thoughts) personally or believe the stories about "reality" that we build from them,when we can simply hold them in awareness with a sense of curiosity and wonder at their amazing power given their insubstantiality, their limitations,and inaccuracies,then we have a chance right in that moment,in any moment really,to not get caught in their habitual patterning,to see thoughts for what they are,impersonal events.Then in that moment at least, we are already free,ready to act with greater clarity and kindness within the constantly changing field of events that is nothing other than life unfolding-- not always as we think it should,but definitely as it is.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
Integration arises from intimacy with our emotions and our bodies, as well as with our thoughts.
Sharon Salzberg
There is no inner peace found in taking care of me and mine. It is present in attending to the needs of we and ours.
John Bruna
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
The tremendous danger is that this belief - that genuine happiness comes only from pleasant feelings - becomes a strong motivation to stay closed to anything unpleasant. But by staying closed to all unpleasantness, we also stay closed to our own wellspring of compassion.
Joseph Goldstein
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