Sharon Salzberg Quotes - Page 4

Concepts such as loving kindness should never be used as weapons against our real feelings.

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.

Compassion has more to do with the attitude we bring to our encounters with other people than with any quantifiable metric of giving.

Kindness is really at the core of what it means to be and feel alive.

A lack of real love for ourselves is one of the most constricting, painful conditions we can know.

It’s affirming that we can look at any experience from the fullness of our being and get past the shame we carry.

We don’t need any sort of religious orientation to lead a life that is ethical, compassionate & kind.

Our ability to connect with others is innate, wired into our nervous systems, and we need connection as much as we need physical nourishment.

The first step toward feeling compassion for others is to set the intention to try it out.

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.

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.

When we learn to respond to disappointments with acceptance, we give ourselves the space to realize that all our experiences—good and bad alike—are opportunities to learn and grow.

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.

From our first breath to our last, we’re presented again and again with the opportunity to experience deep, lasting, and trans-formative connection with other beings: to love them and be loved by them; to show them our true natures and to recognize theirs.

When we are willing to explore our own experiences, we open the doorway to deeper connection and intimacy.

There is a sentiment common among most of us when it comes to love—letting go can feel scary.

When we identify the thoughts that keep us from seeing others as they truly are we prepare the ground for real love.

When we believe a wounding story, our whole world is diminished.

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.

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.

The practice of sympathetic joy is rooted in inner development. It’s not a matter of learning techniques to “make friends and influence people.” Instead, we build the foundations of our own happiness. When our own cup is full, we more easily share it with others.

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.

Love exists in itself, not relying on owning or being owned.

A key barometer to help us weigh the rightness of our actions is self-respect.

We nurture our sense of connection with the larger whole, noticing that the whole is only as healthy as its smallest part.

Be open to the possibility that there are other paths available to you in relating to yourself and to another.

What we learn in meditation, we can apply to all other realms of our lives.

To truly love ourselves, we must challenge our beliefs that we need to be different or better.

The practice of loving-kindness is about cultivating love as a trans-formative strength,

Letting go is an inside job, something only we can do for ourselves.

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.

When we don’t allow setbacks to defeat us, they become opportunities for learning, acceptance, flexibility, and patience.

Although love is often depicted as starry-eyed and sweet, love for the self is made of tougher stuff.

Maybe what we really need is to change our relationship to what is, to see who we are with the strength of a generous spirit & a wise heart.

We are born ready to love and be loved. It is our birthright.

Real Love may run on a lower voltage, but it’s also more grounded & sustainable.

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.

When we respond to our pain and suffering with love, understanding, and acceptance—for ourselves, as well as others— over time, we can let go of our anger, even when we’ve been hurt to the core. But that doesn’t mean we ever forget.

Once someone appears to us primarily as an object, kindness has no place to root.

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.

Love is defined by difficult acts of human compassion & generosity.

When we don’t tell those we love about what’s really going on or listen carefully to what they have to say, we tend to fill in the blanks with stories.

When we experience inner impoverishment, love for another too easily becomes hunger: for reassurance, for acclaim, for affirmation of our worth.

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.

Integration arises from intimacy with our emotions and our bodies, as well as with our thoughts.

Never feel ashamed of your longing for happiness.

The more we identify and acknowledge moments when we’re unable to share in someone else’s pleasure and ask ourselves whether another person’s happiness truly jeopardizes our own, the more we pave the way for experiencing sympathetic joy

Mindfulness won’t ensure you’ll win an argument with your sister. Mindfulness won’t enable you to bypass your feelings of anger or hurt either. But it may help you see the conflict in a new way, one that allows you to break through old patterns.

Equanimity can be hard to talk about.

The idea that traumatic residues—or unresolved stories—can be inherited is groundbreaking.

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.

Real Love for ourselves by definition includes every aspect of our lives—the good, the bad, the difficult, the challenging past, the uncertain future, as well as all the shameful, upsetting experiences and encounters we’d just as soon forget.

We cannot simply forgive and forget, nor should we.

Asking questions is an opportunity for creativity and personal expression, both for the person asking and the person answering.

It is awareness of both our shared pain and our longing for happiness that links us to other people and helps us to turn toward them with compassion.

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?

For any marginalized group to change the story that society tells about them takes courage and perseverance.

Our minds tend to race ahead into the future or replay the past, but our bodies are always in the present moment.

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.

While happiness is an end in itself, it is also the state of mind we can have right now.