Sharon Salzberg Quotes

Meditation is essentially training our attention so that we can be more aware— not only of our own inner workings but also of what’s happening around us in the here & now.

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.

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.

Love simply, perpetually exists and that it’s a matter of psychic housekeeping to make room for it.

Our vision becomes very narrow when we need things to be a certain way and cannot accept things the way they actually are.

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

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.

Telling the story, acknowledging what has happened and how you feel, is often a necessary part of forgiveness.

With the practice of meditation we can develop this ability to more fully love ourselves and to more consistently love others.

Thinking we are only supposed to have loving & compassionate feelings can be a terrible obstacle to spiritual practice.

When emotions are long held and extremely complex, it sometimes takes years for them to enter fully into awareness.

We truly can reconfigure how we see ourselves and reclaim the love for ourselves that we’re innately capable of.

Mindfulness helps us see the addictive aspect of self-criticism— a repetitive cycle of flaying ourselves again and again, feeling the pain anew.

The difference between a life laced through with frustration and one sustained by happiness depends on whether it is motivated by self-hatred or by real love for oneself.

In order to free ourselves from our assumptions about love, we must ask ourselves what long-held, often buried assumptions are and then face them, which takes courage, humility, and kindness.

We can use meditation as a way to experiment with new ways of relating to ourselves, even our uncomfortable thoughts.

The overarching practice of letting go is also one of gaining resilience and insight.

We long for permanence but everything in the known universe is transient. That’s a fact but one we fight.

Grief helps us to relinquish the illusion that the past could be different from what it was.

We have the power to improve our work lives immeasurably through awareness, compassion, patience & ingenuity.

To forgive, we may need to open our minds to a fuller exploration of the context in which the events occurred, and feel compassion for the circumstances and everyone involved, starting with ourselves.

Mindfulness practice helps create space between our actual experiences and the reflexive stories we tend to tell about them.

Though it may sound paradoxical, identifying our thoughts, emotions, and habitual patterns of behavior is the key to freedom & transformation.

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.

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.

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.

Meditation is a microcosm, a model, a mirror. The skills we practice when we sit are transferable to the rest of our lives.

We use mindfulness to observe the way we cling to pleasant experiences & push away unpleasant ones.

To reteach a thing its loveliness is the nature of metta. Through lovingkindness, everyone & everything can flower again from within.

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.

Anger often makes us hurt ourselves more than any enemy.

The paradigm for our relationships is formed from our earliest experiences and is actually hardwired into our neurological and emotional network.

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.

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.

Rather than trying to control what can never be controlled, we can find a sense of security in being able to meet what is actually happening. This is allowing for the mystery of things: not judging but rather cultivating a balance of mind that can receive what is happening, whatever it is. This acceptance is the source of our safety and confidence.When we feel unhappiness or pain, it is not a sign that things have gone terribly wrong or that we have done something wrong by not being able to control the circumstances. Pain and pleasure are constantly coming and going, and yet we can be happy. When we allow for the mystery , sometimes we can discover that right in the heart of a very difficult time, right in the midst of a painful situation, there is freedom. In those moments when we realize how much we cannot control, we can learn to let go. As we begin to understand this, we move from a mode of struggling to control what comes into our lives into a mode of simply wishing to truly connect with what is. This is a radical shift in worldview.

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.

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.

Genuine awe connects us with the world in a new way.

We begin to cultivate real love for ourselves when we treat ourselves with compassion.

The more we practice sympathetic joy, the more we come to realize that the happiness we share with others is inseparable from our own happiness.

When we open our hearts to the breadth of our experiences, we learn to tune into our needs, unique perceptions, thoughts & feelings

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.

Pain & suffering requires time, awareness, and an intentional practice of self-love to disentangle.

Like water poured from one vessel to another, metta flows freely, taking the shape of each situation without changing its essence.

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.

Kindness is not a fixed trait that we either have or lack, but more like a muscle that can be developed and strengthened.

Loving ourselves calls us to give up the illusion that we can control everything and focuses us on building our inner resource of resilience.

Fearful of wasting a second, we hoard time as if it were money.

Mindfulness is so much wiser and more robust than our inner critic.

As soon as we ask whether or not a story is true in the present moment, we empower ourselves to re-frame it.

People turn to meditation because they want to make good decisions, break bad habits & bounce back better from disappointments.

Meditation is not about what's happening, it is about how we're relating to what's happening.

Even as we recognize our resentment, bitterness, or jealousy, we can also honor our own wish to be happy, to feel free.

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.

We can understand the inherent radiance & purity of our minds by understanding metta. Like the mind, metta is not distorted by what it encounters.

Forgiveness is the way we break the grip that long-held resentments have on our hearts.

When we develop our ability to love in one realm, we simultaneously nourish our ability in others, as long as we remain open to the flow of insight and compassion.

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.

Only when we start to distinguish reality from fantasy that we can humbly, with eyes wide open, forge loving and sustainable connections with others.

The starting place for radical re-imagining of love is mindfulness.