Sharon Salzberg Quotes - Page 5

We find greater lightness & ease in our lives as we increasingly care for ourselves & other beings.

As a friend of mine told me about Real Happiness: you wrote this one in American.

Mindfulness may help you gain insight into your role in conflicts with others, it won’t single-highhandedly help you resolve them.

When we direct a lot of hostile energy toward the inner critic, we enter into a losing battle.

Mindfulness helps us get better at seeing the difference between what’s happening and the stories we tell ourselves about what’s happening, stories that get in the way of direct experience. Often such stories treat a fleeting state of mind as if it were our entire and permanent self.

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

Trying to impose our personal agenda on someone else’s experience is the shadow side of love, while real love recognizes that life unfolds at its own pace.

In order to do anything about the suffering of the world we must have the strength to face it without turning away.

When we experience dissatisfaction at work, which everyone does we can use our disappointment as fuel to wake up.

We need the courage to learn from our past and not live in it.

When we set an intention to explore our emotional hot spots, we create a pathway to real love.

Forgiveness is a process, an admittedly difficult one that often can feel like a rigorous spiritual practice.

Keeping secrets is a consequential act for all involved.

To relinquish the futile effort to control change is one of the strengthening forces of true detachment & thus true love.

We often get caught up in our own reactions and forget the vulnerability of the person in front of us.

Love is a living capacity within us that is always present, even when we don’t sense it.

You don't have to love yourself unconditionally before you can give or receive real love.

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.

Let the breath lead the way.

To sense which gifts to accept & which to leave behind is our path to discovering freedom.

Seeking happiness is not the problem. The problem is that we often do not know where and how to find genuine happiness and so make the mistakes that cause suffering for ourselves & others.

Sometimes people in abusive situations think they’re responsible for the other person’s happiness or that they’re going to fix them and make them feel better. The practice of equanimity teaches that it’s not all up to you to make someone else happy.

The more we practice mindfulness, the more alert we become to the cost of keeping secrets.

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.

Science tells us that love not only diminishes the experience of physical pain but can make us—and our beloveds—healthier.

Feelings of apathy as they relate to our relationships often stem from insufficiently paying attention to those around us.

Forgiveness that is insincere, forced or premature can be more psychologically damaging than authentic bitterness & rage.

Without equanimity, we might give love to others only in an effort to bridge the inevitable and healthy space that always exists between two people.

Laughing at your pettiness probably works better than scolding yourself for it.

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.

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.

When we contemplate the miracle of embodied life, we begin to partner with our bodies in a kinder way.

Because the development of inner calm & energy happens completely within & isn’t dependent on another person or a particular situation, we begin to feel a resourcefulness and independence that is quite beautiful—and a huge relief.

We can discover the capacity of the mind to be aware, to love, to begin again

We have to know ourselves to know where we end and another person begins, and we have to develop the skills to navigate the space between us. Or else we will seek wholeness through false means that honor neither us nor those we love.

We’re capable of much more than mediocrity, much more than merely getting by in this world.

To imagine the way we think is the singular causative agent of all we go through is to practice cruelty toward ourselves.

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.

Smiling at someone can have significant health consequences.

You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection

When we approach the journey acknowledging what we do not know and what we can’t control, we maintain our energy for the quest.

One foundation of loving relationships is curiosity, keeping open to the idea that we have much to learn even about those we have been close to for decades.

Loving-kindness challenges those states that tend to arise when we think of ourselves as isolated from everyone else—fear, a sense of deficiency, alienation, loneliness.

If we look at the force of anger, we can, in fact, discover many positive aspects in it. Anger is not a passive, complacent state. It has incredible energy. Anger can impel us to let go of ways we may be inappropriately defined by the needs of others; it can teach us to say no. In this way it also serves our integrity, because anger can motivate us to turn from the demands of the outer world to the nascent voice of our inner world. It is a way to set boundaries and to challenge injustice at every level. Anger will not take things for granted or simply accept them mindlessly.Anger also has the ability to cut through surface appearances; it does not just stay on a superficial level. It is very critical; it is very demanding. Anger has the power to pierce through the obvious to things that are more hidden. This is why anger may be transmuted to wisdom. By nature, anger has characteristics in common with wisdom.Nevertheless, the unskillful aspects of anger are immense, and they far outweigh the positive aspects.

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.

As we explore new ways of thinking, we need to be willing to investigate, experiment, take some risks with our attention, and stretch.

So often, fear keeps us from being able to say yes to love—perhaps our greatest challenge as human beings.

We can free ourselves from the old stories that have reduced us & allow real love for ourselves to blossom.

When you recognize and reflect on even one good thing about yourself, you are building a bridge to a place of kindness and caring.

The wholesome pursuit of excellence feels quite different from perfectionism.

When we pay attention to sensations in our bodies, we can feel that love is the energetic opposite of fear.

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.

Identifying the source of our personal narratives helps us to release its negative aspects and re-frame it in ways that promote wholeness.

When we constantly hear that we should be smarter, better connected, more productive, wealthier—it takes real courage to claim the time and space to follow the currents of our talents, our aspirations, and our hearts, which may lead in a very different direction.

Sanskrit has different words to describe love for a brother or sister, love for a teacher, love for a partner, love for one’s friends, love of nature, and so on. English has only one word, which leads to never-ending confusion.

How we traverse the space between us when conflict arises has a profound effect on the health and longevity of our relationships.

Our practice rather than being about killing the ego is about simply discovering our true nature.

The key in letting go is practice. Each time we let go, we disentangle ourselves from our expectations and begin to experience things as they are.

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.

The manifestation of the free mind is said to be lovingkindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity.