Quotes by Meditation Teachers - Page 3

Truly listening, attentively, and with care, is one of the simplest and most kind gifts we can give anyone.
John Bruna
Your genuine happiness does not come from other people, activities or things, it comes from living a meaningful life - a life that is in alignment with your values and is beneficial.
John Bruna
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
One who is patient glows with an inner radiance.
Allan Lokos
Technology offers us a unique opportunity, though rarely welcome, to practice patience.
Allan Lokos
Patience requires a slowing down, a spaciousness, a sense of ease.
Allan Lokos
Loving others is the greatest gift we can give ourselves. Altruism that rewards one's self.
Allan Lokos
The embodiment of kindness is often made difficult by our long ingrained patternsof fear & jealousy.
Sharon Salzberg
The essence of the Dharma (the teachings of the Buddha) is about identifying the cause of our suffering & alleviating it.
Allan Lokos
Compassion is not complete if it does not include oneself.
Allan Lokos
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
Patience has all the time it needs.
Allan Lokos
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
The virtues of free enterprise can become distorted by greed & delusion.
Allan Lokos
Grief helps us to relinquish the illusion that the past could be different from what it was.
Sharon Salzberg
When we forgive others, we give ourselves permission to let go of our own suffering.
John Bruna
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
To forgive does not mean to condone.
Allan Lokos
If I am not the body that was born and dies, and I am not the mind that always changes, then who am I? The One who is aware of the body, aware of the mind, and aware of the questions.
Leonard Perlmutter
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
Every day, whatever you do, you trade a day of your life for it.
Shaila Catherine
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
Compassion is a fundamental principle of meditation. Meditation is not a narcissistic, self-interested path. It provides the foundation for love, integrity, compassion, respect and sensitivity (Feldman, 1998, p.2).
Christina Feldman
Anybody who is imitating somebody else, no matter who it us, is heading in the wrong direction. It is impossible to become like somebody else. Your only hope is to become more fully yourself.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
Meditation provides the tools not only to abide more comfortably in the present, but also to observe rather than engage with unhappiness-creating thoughts.
David Michie
When we're being mindful, we're paying attention to the present moment, deliberately and non-judgementally. When we're meditating, we're being mindful of a specific object, such as the sensation of the breath at the tip of our nostrils, for a sustained period of time.
David Michie
Non-doing simply means letting things be and allowing them to unfold in their own way.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
Mindfulness is so much wiser and more robust than our inner critic.
Sharon Salzberg
Another way to look at meditation is to view the process of thinking itself as a waterfall, a continual cascading of thought. In cultivating mindfulness we are going beyond or behind our thinking, much the way you might find a vantagepoint in a cave or depression in a rock behind a waterfall. We still see and hear the water, but we are out of the torrent.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
We resonate with one another’s sorrows because we are interconnected. Being whole and simultaneously part of a larger whole, we can change the world simply by changing ourselves. If I become a center of love and kindness in this moment, then in a perhaps small but hardly insignificant way, the world now has a nucleus of love and kindness it lacked the moment before. This benefits me and it benefits others.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
There is really no natural limit to the practice of loving kindness in meditation or in one’s life. It is an ongoing, ever-expanding realization of interconnectedness. It is also its embodiment. When you can love one tree or one flower or one dog or one place, or one person or yourself for one moment, you can find all people, all places, all suffering, all harmony in that one moment. Practicing in this way is not trying to change anything or get anywhere, although it might look like it on the surface. What it is really doing is uncovering what is always present. Love and kindness are here all the time, somewhere, in fact, everywhere. Usually our ability to touch them and be touched by them lies buried below our own fears and hurts, below our greed and our hatreds, below our desperate clinging to the illusion that we are truly separate and alone. (
Jon Kabat-Zinn
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