Sharon Salzberg Quotes
By accepting and learning to embrace the inevitable sorrows of life, we realize that we can experience a more enduring sense of happiness.
The journey to loving ourselves doesn’t mean we like everything.
When we direct a lot of hostile energy toward the inner critic, we enter into a losing battle.
When we approach the journey acknowledging what we do not know and what we can’t control, we maintain our energy for the quest.
When we relate to ourselves with loving kindness, perfectionism naturally drops away.
When we contemplate the miracle of embodied life, we begin to partner with our bodies in a kinder way.
The heart contracts when our bodies are overcome by shame.
Shame weakens us. It can make us frightened to take on something new. We start to withdraw from whatever might give us pleasure, self-esteem, or a sense of our value.
To imagine the way we think is the singular causative agent of all we go through is to practice cruelty toward ourselves.
It’s affirming that we can look at any experience from the fullness of our being and get past the shame we carry.
Mindfulness allows us to shift the angle on our story and to remember that we have the capacity to learn and change in ways that are productive, not self-defeating.
We can use meditation as a way to experiment with new ways of relating to ourselves, even our uncomfortable thoughts.
if we really look at our actions with eyes of love, we see that our lives can be more straightforward, simpler, less sculpted by regret and fear, more in alignment with our deepest values.
Paying attention to the ethical implications of our choices has never been more pressing—or more complicated—than it is today.
Causing harm is never just a one-way street.
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.
When we feel conflicted about a particular decision or action, our bodies often hold the answer—if we take the time to stop and tune in.
You can see your thoughts and emotions arise & create space for them even if they are uncomfortable.
The breath is the first tool for opening the space between the story you tell yourself about love.
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.
Mindfulness practice helps create space between our actual experiences and the reflexive stories we tend to tell about them.
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.
Our senses are often the gateway to our stories.
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?
Mindfulness is so much wiser and more robust than our inner critic.
Compassion is born out of lovingkindness.It is born of knowing our oneness, not just thinking about it or wishing it were so. It is born out of the wisdom of seeing things exactly as they are.
The manifestation of the free mind is said to be lovingkindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity.
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.
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.
We have the power to improve our work lives immeasurably through awareness, compassion, patience & ingenuity.
Meditation is not about what's happening, it is about how we're relating to what's happening.
Being happy at work is possible for all of us, anytime & anywhere, with open eyes and a caring heart
When we experience dissatisfaction at work, which everyone does we can use our disappointment as fuel to wake up.