Quotes by Meditation Teachers - Page 7

Real Love may run on a lower voltage, but it’s also more grounded & sustainable.
Sharon Salzberg
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.
Sharon Salzberg
Fill what is empty empty what is full
davidji
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.
Sharon Salzberg
Once someone appears to us primarily as an object, kindness has no place to root.
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
Love is defined by difficult acts of human compassion & generosity.
Sharon Salzberg
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.
Sharon Salzberg
When we experience inner impoverishment, love for another too easily becomes hunger: for reassurance, for acclaim, for affirmation of our worth.
Sharon Salzberg
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.
Sharon Salzberg
Symptoms of illness and distress, plus your feelings about them, can be viewed as messengers coming to tell you something important about your body or about your mind. In the old days, if a king didn't like the message he was given, he would sometimes have the messenger killed. This is tantamount to suppressing your symptoms or your feelings because they are unwanted. Killing the messenger and denying the message or raging against it are not intelligent ways of approaching healing. The one thing we don't want to do is to ignore or rupture the essential connections that can complete relevant feedback loops and restore self-regulation and balance. Our real challenge when we have symptoms is to see if we can listen to their message and really hear them and take them to heart, that is, make the connection fully.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
On the surface, reality may appear the same each day, but in essence, we are new every moment of our lives. The potential for change and growth is unlimited if we allow ourselves to surrender to the flow.
Dorit Brauer
Integration arises from intimacy with our emotions and our bodies, as well as with our thoughts.
Sharon Salzberg
Never feel ashamed of your longing for happiness.
Sharon Salzberg
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
Sharon Salzberg
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.
Sharon Salzberg
Equanimity can be hard to talk about.
Sharon Salzberg
Our fragile, perishable bodies are not who we are. We are the sum of fleeting moments that belong to us for eternity. It is our choice and responsibility to create moments of beauty and grace, instead of despair and suffering.
Dorit Brauer
Another way to look at meditation is to view the process of thinking itself as a waterfall, a continual cascading of thought. In cultivating mindfulness we are going beyond or behind our thinking, much the way you might find a vantagepoint in a cave or depression in a rock behind a waterfall. We still see and hear the water, but we are out of the torrent.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
The challenge of mindfulness is to work with the very circumstances that you find yourself in - no matter how unpleasant, how discouraging, how limited, how unending and stuck they may appear to be - and to make sure that you have done everything in your power to use their energies to transform yourself before you decide to cut your losses and move on.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
We cannot force the development of mindfulness.
Allan Lokos
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
The idea that traumatic residues—or unresolved stories—can be inherited is groundbreaking.
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
The awareness is not part of the darkness or the pain; it holds the pain, and knows it, so it has to be more fundamental, and closer to what is healthy and strong and golden within you.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
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.
Sharon Salzberg
We cannot simply forgive and forget, nor should we.
Sharon Salzberg
Asking questions is an opportunity for creativity and personal expression, both for the person asking and the person answering.
Sharon Salzberg
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.
Sharon Salzberg
We spend so much of our life in activity…we almost feel uncomfortable just being – but that is huge restorative break in the wild swirl of activity around us – it’s like pulling back the bow in archery – like taking that big deep breath in before you dive into your day.
davidji
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?
Sharon Salzberg
For any marginalized group to change the story that society tells about them takes courage and perseverance.
Sharon Salzberg
Our minds tend to race ahead into the future or replay the past, but our bodies are always in the present moment.
Sharon Salzberg
I didn't know you had a cat!' she excl
David Michie
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.
Sharon Salzberg
When you look back at the painful and difficult events of your life, you find that they were the times of your greatest personal growth. The challenges of our lives provide us the opportunity to develop our highest potentials.
John Bruna
While happiness is an end in itself, it is also the state of mind we can have right now.
Sharon Salzberg
Surely you're not saying that the life of a human and the life of an animal are of the same value?' he ven
David Michie
We find greater lightness & ease in our lives as we increasingly care for ourselves & other beings.
Sharon Salzberg
Karma is often wrongly confused with the notion of a fixed destiny. It is more like an accumulation of tendencies that can lock us into particular behavior patterns, which themselves result in further accumulations of tendencies of a similar nature... But is is not necessary to be a prisoner of old karma.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
As a friend of mine told me about Real Happiness: you wrote this one in American.
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
When we direct a lot of hostile energy toward the inner critic, we enter into a losing battle.
Sharon Salzberg
Anybody who is imitating somebody else, no matter who it us, is heading in the wrong direction. It is impossible to become like somebody else. Your only hope is to become more fully yourself.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
Women are the true maintenance class. Society is built upon their acquiescence and upon their small and necessary labours.
Sally Kempton
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.
Sharon Salzberg
We have between 60,000- and 80,000 thoughts a day. That’s a thought every 1.2 seconds…but we are not our thoughts – we have thoughts. Just like a cell phone is not our texts…it receives texts but they are not the phone. You have thoughts but you are not your thoughts.
davidji
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
Sharon Salzberg
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.
Sharon Salzberg
One way to think of this dignity is to equate when you are on the path with unraveling a ball of yarn. You have wound your sense of self so tightly that it's hard to be anything other than you, a big ball of yarn. That's just who you are, not string, or threads, but a ball of yarn.
Lodro Rinzler
In order to do anything about the suffering of the world we must have the strength to face it without turning away.
Sharon Salzberg
The art of peaceful living comes down to living compassionately & wisely.
Allan Lokos
When we experience dissatisfaction at work, which everyone does we can use our disappointment as fuel to wake up.
Sharon Salzberg
Arriving someplace more desirable at some future time is an illusion. This is it.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
In Buddhism we also interprete Dharma to mean 'cessation,' as in the end of dissatisfaction, the end of dukkha. This is the purpose of Buddha's teachings.
David Michie
We need the courage to learn from our past and not live in it.
Sharon Salzberg
There is seldom any rational reason for having regreats about past deeds or events. Because the past does not exist in any other way than in your memory.When you recognise this lack of reality, you can be calm.
Paul Wilson
When we set an intention to explore our emotional hot spots, we create a pathway to real love.
Sharon Salzberg
Thought doesn't wrap around awareness. Awareness wraps around thought.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
See for yourself whether letting go when a part of you really wants to hold on doesn't bring a deeper satisfaction than clinging.
Jon Kabat-Zinn