Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art Of Mindful Connection Quotes
We can free ourselves from the old stories that have reduced us & allow real love for ourselves to blossom.
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.
Compassion has more to do with the attitude we bring to our encounters with other people than with any quantifiable metric of giving.
The first step toward feeling compassion for others is to set the intention to try it out.
Integration arises from intimacy with our emotions and our bodies, as well as with our thoughts.
Pain & suffering requires time, awareness, and an intentional practice of self-love to disentangle.
Self-love is an unfolding process that gains strength over time, not a goal with a fixed end point.
We truly can reconfigure how we see ourselves and reclaim the love for ourselves that we’re innately capable of.
Although love is often depicted as starry-eyed and sweet, love for the self is made of tougher stuff.
When we believe a wounding story, our whole world is diminished.
Concepts such as loving kindness should never be used as weapons against our real feelings.
The combination of realizing our distinctiveness along with our unity is seeing interdependence.
Respecting differences while gaining insight into our essential connected-ness, we can free ourselves from the impulse to rigidly categorize the world in terms of narrow boundaries and labels.
Our ability to connect with others is innate, wired into our nervous systems, and we need connection as much as we need physical nourishment.
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.
The overarching practice of letting go is also one of gaining resilience and insight.
Mindfulness helps us see the addictive aspect of self-criticism— a repetitive cycle of flaying ourselves again and again, feeling the pain anew.
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.
Many strong emotions are actually intricate tapestries woven of various strands.
Even as we live with the knowledge that each day might be our last, we don’t want to believe it.