Sharon Salzberg Quotes
By experimenting with sympathetic joy, we break from the constricted world of individual struggle and see that joy exists in more places than we have yet imagined.
To celebrate someone else’s life, we need to find a way to look at it straight on, not from above with judgment or from below with envy.
There is no conflict between loving others deeply and living mindfully.
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.
Love is defined by difficult acts of human compassion & generosity.
Love simply, perpetually exists and that it’s a matter of psychic housekeeping to make room for it.
Everyone we interact with has the capacity to surprise us in an infinite number of ways. What can first open us up to each of our innate capacities for love is merely to recognize that.
When we identify the thoughts that keep us from seeing others as they truly are we prepare the ground for real love.
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.
Setting the intention to practice kindness toward one’s partner or family members or friends does not preclude getting angry or upset.
We exercise kindness in any moment when we recognize our shared humanity—with all the hopes, dreams, joys, disappointments, vulnerability, and suffering that implies.
All of our actions can signify self-love or self-sabotage
We are born ready to love and be loved. It is our birthright.
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.
What happens in our hearts is our field of freedom. As long as we carry old wounds and anger in our hearts, we continue to suffer. Forgiveness allows us to move on.
Though it may sound paradoxical, identifying our thoughts, emotions, and habitual patterns of behavior is the key to freedom & transformation.
Awareness levels the playing field. We are all humans doing the best we can.
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.
When we open our hearts to the breadth of our experiences, we learn to tune into our needs, unique perceptions, thoughts & feelings
You are a person worthy of love. You don’t have to do anything to prove that.
In order to free ourselves from our assumptions about love, we must ask ourselves what long-held, often buried assumptions are and then face them, which takes courage, humility, and kindness.
It takes a special courage to challenge the rigid confines of our accustomed story. It’s not easy to radically alter our views about where happiness comes from but it’s eminently possible.
Taking in another’s criticism, even when it’s offered out of love, requires courage.
The good news is that opportunities for love enter our lives unpredictably, whether or not we’ve perfected self-compassion or befriended our inner critic.
The simple act of being completely attentive & present to another person is an act of love, and it fosters unshakeable well-being.
Like water poured from one vessel to another, metta flows freely, taking the shape of each situation without changing its essence.
We can understand the inherent radiance & purity of our minds by understanding metta. Like the mind, metta is not distorted by what it encounters.
When emotions are long held and extremely complex, it sometimes takes years for them to enter fully into awareness.
The practice of loving-kindness is about cultivating love as a trans-formative strength,
Kindness is not a fixed trait that we either have or lack, but more like a muscle that can be developed and strengthened.
When we learn to respond to disappointments with acceptance, we give ourselves the space to realize that all our experiences—good and bad alike—are opportunities to learn and grow.
Loving ourselves calls us to give up the illusion that we can control everything and focuses us on building our inner resource of resilience.
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.
Asking questions is an opportunity for creativity and personal expression, both for the person asking and the person answering.
Buddha first taught metta meditation as an antidote: as a way of surmounting terrible fear when it arises.
There’s no denying that it takes effort to set the intention to see our fundamental connected-ness with others.
If we have nothing material to give, we can offer our attention, our energy, our appreciation. The world needs us. It doesn’t deplete us to give.
We’re in charge of our own forgiveness, and the process takes time, patience, and intention.
Kindness is really at the core of what it means to be and feel alive.
If we truly loved ourselves, we’d never harm another. That is a truly revolutionary, celebratory mode of self-care.
The more we practice mindfulness, the more alert we become to the cost of keeping secrets.
We’re capable of much more than mediocrity, much more than merely getting by in this world.
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.
Our minds tend to race ahead into the future or replay the past, but our bodies are always in the present moment.
The skills available to us through mindfulness make it possible to bring love to our connections with others.
What we learn in meditation, we can apply to all other realms of our lives.
Keeping secrets is a consequential act for all involved.
The environment we create can help heal us or fracture us. This is true not just for buildings and landscapes but also for interactions and relationships.
So often, fear keeps us from being able to say yes to love—perhaps our greatest challenge as human beings.
