Quotes by Meditation Teachers - Page 5

With mindfulness, loving kindness, and self-compassion, we can begin to let go of our expectations about how life and those we love should be.
Sharon Salzberg
It is a state of peace to be able to accept things as they are. This is to be at home in our own lives. We see that this universe is much too big to hold on to, but it is the perfect size for letting go. Our hearts and minds become that big, and we can actually let go. This is the gift of equanimity.
Sharon Salzberg
Patience is a natural consequence of the cultivation of compassion & love, for ourselves and all beings.
Allan Lokos
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
It's not that God, the environment, and other people cannot help us to be happy or find satisfaction. It's just that our happiness, satisfaction, and our understanding, even of God, will be no deeper than our capacity to know ourselves inwardly, to encounter the world from the deep comfort that comes from being at home in one's own skin, from an intimate familiarity with the ways of one's own mind and body.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
The challenge for mindfulness is to be present for your experience as it is rather than immediately jumping in to change it or try to force it to be different.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
Not everyone wants to take up meditation, but most people can feel an alignment with values like mutual respect, insightful investigation, listening to one another.Meditation is a way to help those values become real in day-to-day life, helping people to understand themselves more and more and have a way to not get lost in old patterns.
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
Self-love is an unfolding process that gains strength over time, not a goal with a fixed end point.
Sharon Salzberg
You can see your thoughts and emotions arise & create space for them even if they are uncomfortable.
Sharon Salzberg
If you’re reading these words, perhaps it’s because something has kicked open the door for you, and you’re ready to embrace change. It isn’t enough to appreciate change from afar, or only in the abstract, or as something that can happen to other people but not to you. We need to create change for ourselves, in a workable way, as part of our everyday lives.
Sharon Salzberg
The virtues of getting up early have nothing to do with cramming more hours of busyness and industry into one's day. Just the opposite. They stem from the stillness and solitude of the hour, and the potential to use that time to expand consciousness, to contemplate, to make time for being, for purposefully not doing anything. The peacefulness, the darkness, the dawn, the stillness - all contribute to making early morning a special time for mindfulness practice.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
Buddha first taught metta meditation as an antidote: as a way of surmounting terrible fear when it arises.
Sharon Salzberg
If we truly loved ourselves, we’d never harm another. That is a truly revolutionary, celebratory mode of self-care.
Sharon Salzberg
Many strong emotions are actually intricate tapestries woven of various strands.
Sharon Salzberg
Guilt is a manifestation of condemnation or aversion towards oneself, which does not understand the changing transformative quality of mind.'Seeking the Heart of Wisdom
Joseph Goldstein
Meditation trains the mind the way physical exercise strengthens the body.
Sharon Salzberg
Patience is both the tool for and the result of, our efforts.
Allan Lokos
The causes of familial discord and distance are countless, but the results are often the same: secrecy, blame, sadness, hurt, confusion, and feelings of loss and grief.
Sharon Salzberg
For men and women alike, this journey is a the trajectory between birth and death, a human life lived. No one escapes the adventure. We only work with it differently.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
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
Whether we fear the existence of boundaries with others or crave more of them, there’s no denying that individuation and separation are inevitable parts of loving relationships that become the site of tension.
Sharon Salzberg
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
Rest as the awareness that is aware without using thought.
Loch Kelly
Awareness levels the playing field. We are all humans doing the best we can.
Sharon Salzberg
Every single moment is expressive of the truth of our lives when we know how to look.
Sharon Salzberg
Directing the mind to stay in the present can be a formidable task.
Allan Lokos
A relationship is the union of two psychological systems.
Sharon Salzberg
Thoughts, words, emotions & deeds not coming from love are likely coming from fear.
Allan Lokos
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
Being happy at work is possible for all of us, anytime & anywhere, with open eyes and a caring heart
Sharon Salzberg
Effort is the unconstrained willingness to persevere through difficulty.
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
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
There are always waves on the water. Sometimes they are big, sometimes they are small, and sometimes they are almost imperceptible. The water’s waves are churned up by the winds, which come and go and vary in direction and intensity, just as do the winds of stress and change in our lives, which stir up the waves in our minds.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
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
Sometimes kindness is stepping aside, letting go of our need to be right & just being happy for someone.
Sharon Salzberg
Non-doing simply means letting things be and allowing them to unfold in their own way.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
To forgive does not mean to forget.
Allan Lokos
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
All of our actions can signify self-love or self-sabotage
Sharon Salzberg
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
You are a person worthy of love. You don’t have to do anything to prove that.
Sharon Salzberg
In Buddhism we would say that you are lazy... Despising yourself, thinking you are no good, saying 'I can't do this.' This is the mind of weakness. You must work to overcome it .
David Michie
When we can step back even briefly from our hurt, sorrow, and anger, when we put our faith in the possibility of change, we create the possibility for non-judgmental inquiry that aims for healing rather than victory.
Sharon Salzberg
All beings want to be happy, yet so very few know how. It is out of ignorance that any of us cause suffering, for ourselves or for others
Sharon Salzberg
The future that we want - this is it. This is the future of all the previous thoughts you've ever had about the future. You're in it. You're already in it. What is the purpose of all this living if it's only to get some place else and then when you're there you're not happy anyway, you want to be some place else. It's always for 'when I retire,' 'when I graduate college,' 'when I make enough money,' 'when I get married,' 'when I get divorced,' 'when the kids move out.' It's like, wait a minute, this is it. This is your life. We only have moments. This moment's as good as any other. It's perfect.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
Honor your relationships by developing listening skills.
Allan Lokos
By practicing meditation we establish love, compassion, sympathetic joy & equanimity as our home.
Sharon Salzberg
Accepting the reality of change gives rise to equanimity.
Allan Lokos
You can search throughout the entire universe for someone who is more deserving of your love and affection than you are yourself, and that person is not to be found anywhere. You, yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.
Sharon Salzberg
Observing your thoughts, feelings & sensations is the grist of the practice.
Allan Lokos
There is really no natural limit to the practice of loving kindness in meditation or in one’s life. It is an ongoing, ever-expanding realization of interconnectedness. It is also its embodiment. When you can love one tree or one flower or one dog or one place, or one person or yourself for one moment, you can find all people, all places, all suffering, all harmony in that one moment. Practicing in this way is not trying to change anything or get anywhere, although it might look like it on the surface. What it is really doing is uncovering what is always present. Love and kindness are here all the time, somewhere, in fact, everywhere. Usually our ability to touch them and be touched by them lies buried below our own fears and hurts, below our greed and our hatreds, below our desperate clinging to the illusion that we are truly separate and alone. (
Jon Kabat-Zinn
If we turn away from our own pain, we may find ourselves projecting this aversion onto others, seeing them as somehow inadequate for being in a troubled situation.
Sharon Salzberg
An open beginner's mind is a powerful tool for developing patience.
Allan Lokos
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
Cultivation of positive emotions, including self-love and self-respect, strengthens our inner resources and opens us to a broader range of thoughts and actions.
Sharon Salzberg
[R]emain open to not knowing, perhaps allowing yourself to come to the point of admitting, "I don't know," and then experimenting with relaxing a bit into this not knowing instead of condemning yourself for it. After all, in this moment, it may be an accurate statement of how things are for you.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
Compassion grows in us when we know how the energy of love is available all around us.
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