Quotes by Meditation Teachers - Page 4

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
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
No one looks or feels attractive when angry.
Allan Lokos
We need never be bound by the limitations of our previous or current thinking, nor are we ever locked into being the person we used to be, or think we are.
Allan Lokos
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
Awareness is not the same as thought. It lies beyond thinking, although it makes use of thinking, honoring its value and its power. Awareness is more like a vessel which can hold and contain our thinking, helping us to see and know our thoughts as thoughts rather than getting caught up in them in reality.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
Meditation is a way of being, not a technique. Meditation is not about trying to get anywhere else. It is about allowing yourself to be exactly where you are and as you are, and the world to be exactly as it is in this moment, as well.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
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
You cannot control the results, only your actions.
Allan Lokos
Meditation is the ultimate mobile device; you can use it anywhere, anytime, unobtrusively.
Sharon Salzberg
Mindfulness practice means that we commit fully in each moment to be present; inviting ourselves to interface with this moment in full awareness, with the intention to embody as best we can an orientation of calmness, mindfulness, and equanimity right here and right now.
Jon Kabat-Zinn