Sharon Salzberg Quotes

When you're wide open, the world is a good place.

Each of us has a genuine capacity for love, forgiveness, wisdom and compassion. Meditation awakens these qualities so that we can discover for ourselves the unique happiness that is our birthright.

Mindfulness needs to not be judgmental to really be mindfulness, which means it needs a basis of loving kindness.

In a situation of potential conflict, let compassion guide you.

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

I prefer to think of faith, as Coleridge says of poetry, not as the taking up of belief but as "the willing suspension of disbelief". . . a willingness to be open, to explore, to investigate.

Mindfulness can play a big role in transforming our experience with pain & other difficulties; it allows us to recognize the authenticity of the distress & yet not be overwhelmed by it.

You don't have to believe anything, adopt a dogma in order to learn how to meditate.

I think what we (as a society) need from artists of all kinds is courage, a willingness to explore, and a really big sense of possibility.

The meditation traditions I started and have continued practicing have all emphasized inclusivity: anyone can do this who is interested.

Everyone loses touch with their aspiration, and we need the heart to return to what we really care about. All of this is based on developing greater lovingkindness and compassion.

Faith is not a commodity that you either have or don't have enough of, or the right kind of. It's an ongoing process. The opposite of faith is despair.

I've always said that lovingkindness and compassion are inevitably woven throughout meditation practice even if the words are never used or implied, no matter what technique or method we are using.

Even on the spiritual path, we have things we'll tend to cover up or be in denial about.

We all want to be happy. We need to expand the notion of what that means, to make it bigger and wiser.

What you learn about pain in formal meditation can help you relate to it in your daily life.

The embodiment of kindness is often made difficult by our long ingrained patterns of fear & jealousy.

Rapture is the gateway to nirvana.

I will love myself as long as I never make a mistake.

At 9:10 I'm going to be filled with self-hatred.

In our own lives and in our communities, we need to find a way to include others rather than exclude them. We need to find a way to allow our pain and suffering, individually and collectively.

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

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

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.

There is so much we just can't see or know right now, including precisely how our actions will ripple out.

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

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

Each opportunity to interrupt the onslaught of thoughts and return to the object of meditation is, in fact, a moment of enlightenment

Every time we forget to breathe or our minds wander or we’re hijacked by feelings or sensations, we gently bring ourselves back to the breath, again and again.

We live in a network of inter connectivity.

When we do our best to treat others with kindness, it’s often a struggle to determine which actions best express our love and care for ourselves.

Through meditation we come to know that we are dying & being reborn in every moment.

Just as a prism refracts light differently when you change its angle, each experience of love illuminates love in new ways, drawing from an infinite palette of patterns and hues.

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.

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

We cannot instantaneously force ourselves to forgive—and forgiveness happens at a different pace for everyone and is dependent on the particulars of any given situation.

Telling the story, acknowledging what has happened and how you feel, is often a necessary part of forgiveness.

Grief helps us to relinquish the illusion that the past could be different from what it was.

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

The embodiment of kindness is often made difficult by our long ingrained patternsof fear & jealousy.

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.

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.

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.

The combination of realizing our distinctiveness along with our unity is seeing interdependence.

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

Anger often makes us hurt ourselves more than any enemy.

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

Even as we live with the knowledge that each day might be our last, we don’t want to believe it.