Sharon Salzberg Quotes
Forgiveness that is insincere, forced or premature can be more psychologically damaging than authentic bitterness & rage.
To sense which gifts to accept & which to leave behind is our path to discovering freedom.
Sometimes kindness is stepping aside, letting go of our need to be right & just being happy for someone.
While happiness is an end in itself, it is also the state of mind we can have right now.
Mindfulness is the agent of our freedom. Through mindfulness we arrive at faith we grow in wisdom & we attain equanimity.
Thinking we are only supposed to have loving & compassionate feelings can be a terrible obstacle to spiritual practice.
We can discover the capacity of the mind to be aware, to love, to begin again
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.
Anger often makes us hurt ourselves more than any enemy.
Hatred does not help us alleviate our pain even in the slightest.
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.
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.
Our vision becomes very narrow when we need things to be a certain way and cannot accept things the way they actually are.
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.