Quotes by Meditation Teachers - Page 6

Pain is inevitable... Suffering is optional. We will all have to endure trauma and challenges. What matters is how we move forward afterward. Do we keep carrying the trauma and its causes in our mind? Or can we find a way to let go of them, to end our own suffering?...This is where mindfulness can help us.
David Michie
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
There is little doubt that those who get the most from life are those who look for the wonder in even the smallest things they do. Cultivate this skill and you'll find peace and satisfaction as well.
Paul Wilson
Every thought, word, and action plants seeds in the garden of your life. Are you planting seeds of love, compassion, peace, or those of anger, resentment and dissatisfaction? Choose wisely and tend your garden well.
John Bruna
By practicing meditation we establish love, compassion, sympathetic joy & equanimity as our home.
Sharon Salzberg
The most important step in developing skillful speech is to think before speaking.
Allan Lokos
The more we genuinely care about others the greater our own happiness & inner peace.
Allan Lokos
You might be tempted to avoid the messiness of daily living for the tranquility of stillness and peacefulness. This of course would be an attachment to stillness, and like any strong attachment, it leads to delusion. It arrests development and short-circuits the cultivation of wisdom.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
Remember, everyone you meet is really trying to do the best they can. No one woke up today and intentionally decided to be mean, difficult, or unreasonable - including you.
John Bruna
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
The experience of pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral is the consequences of perception.
Allan Lokos
It's the new best way to start your day - Ram Lev on Facebook Live TOMORROW, Thursday, March 16th, at 7:30am EST."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 the light of a candle has the power to dispel darkness in a room, so also the light developed in one man can help dispel darkness in several others.
Sayagyi U Ba Khin
Perhaps the most "spiritual" thing any of us can do is simply to look through our own eyes, see with eyes of wholeness, and act with integrity and kindness.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
Every moment, every breath, is a new opportunity. An opportunity to let go of the past and to become the person you choose to be.
John Bruna
Meditation does not involve trying to change your thinking by thinking some more. It involves watching thought itself. The watching is the holding. By watching your thoughts without being drawn into them, you can learn something profoundly liberating about thinking itself, which may help you to be less of a prisoner of those thought patterns (….)
Jon Kabat-Zinn
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
True freedom is the ability to respond consciously, in the most beneficial way, to whatever life throws at you.
John Bruna
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
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
Today is sacred - for it will never come again. What could be more important than living this day with attention and the intention to be of benefit, to the best of your ability, to all you encounter?
John Bruna
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