Sharon Salzberg Quotes & Sayings

Love simply, perpetually exists and that it's a matter of psychic housekeeping to make room for it. — Sharon Salzberg

We can use meditation as a way to experiment with new ways of relating to ourselves, even our uncomfortable thoughts. — Sharon Salzberg

Self-compassion is like a muscle. The more we practice flexing it, especially when life doesn't go exactly according to plan (a frequent scenario for most of us), the stronger and more resilient our compassion muscle becomes. — Sharon Salzberg

Vulnerability in the face of constant change is what we share, whatever our present condition. — Sharon Salzberg

Loving-kindness and compassion are the basis for wise, powerful, sometimes gentle, and sometimes fierce actions that can really make a difference - in our own lives and those of others. — Sharon Salzberg

Intellectually, we may appreciate that loving ourselves would give us a firm foundation but for most of us this is a leap of logic, not a leap of the heart. — Sharon Salzberg

You can enhance the practice of generosity by observing those moments when the thought of giving does arise and you resist it. Feel the nature of the resistance - paint a word picture of it. Do you experience it as contraction, rigidity fearfulness? Explore it.
Then examine the impulse to give. What is that sense yielding, letting go, sharing? How would you describe the nature of the generous intention? Do you notice the release from grasping, the recognition that happiness will not come from holding on and clinging? — Sharon Salzberg

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

What we learn in meditation, we can apply to all other realms of our lives. — Sharon Salzberg

We can learn the art of fierce compassion - redefining strength, deconstructing isolation and renewing a sense of community, practicing letting go of rigid us-vs.-them thinking - while cultivating power and clarity in response to difficult situations. — Sharon Salzberg

We cannot simply forgive and forget, nor should we. — Sharon Salzberg

In some ways to be able to forgive, to let go, is a type of dying. It is the ability to say, ' I am not that person anymore, and you are not that person anymore.' Forgiveness allows us to recapture some part of ourselves that we left behind in bondage to a past event. Some part of our identity may also need to die in that letting go, so that we can reclaim the energy bound up in the past, — Sharon Salzberg

Continuous Partial Attention involves an artificial sense of constant crisis, of living in a 24/7, always-on world. It contributes to feeling stressed, overwhelmed, overstimulated, and unfulfilled; it compromises our ability to reflect, to make decisions, and to think creatively. Not — Sharon Salzberg

WHATEVER TAKES US to our edge, to our outer limits, leads us to the heart of life's mystery, and there we find faith. — Sharon Salzberg

Mindfulness may help you gain insight into your role in conflicts with others, it won't single-highhandedly help you resolve them. — Sharon Salzberg

Buddha first taught metta meditation as an antidote: as a way of surmounting terrible fear when it arises. — Sharon Salzberg

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. — Sharon Salzberg

We learn and grow and are transformed not so much by what we do but by why and how we do it. — Sharon Salzberg

From our first breath to our last, we're presented again and again with the opportunity to experience deep, lasting, and trans-formative connection with other beings: to love them and be loved by them; to show them our true natures and to recognize theirs. — Sharon Salzberg

Open Awareness The Angle of Vision Leadership Openness Getting Out of The Way Possibilities MEDITATION: — Sharon Salzberg

Genuine awe connects us with the world in a new way. — Sharon Salzberg

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

As we explore new ways of thinking, we need to be willing to investigate, experiment, take some risks with our attention, and stretch. — Sharon Salzberg

Compassion Judgment Loving-Kindness Compassion Is A Force Disconnection Self-Blame and Compassion Praise and Blame — Sharon Salzberg

But to take delight in our generosity helps us immeasurably in our spiritual practice. — Sharon Salzberg

Laughing at your pettiness probably works better than scolding yourself for it. — Sharon Salzberg

Sometimes people in abusive situations think they're responsible for the other person's happiness or that they're going to fix them and make them feel better. The practice of equanimity teaches that it's not all up to you to make someone else happy. — Sharon Salzberg

Taking in another's criticism, even when it's offered out of love, requires courage. — Sharon Salzberg

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. — Sharon Salzberg

Until we begin to question our basic assumptions about ourselves and view them as fluid, not fixed, it's easy to repeat established patterns and, out of habit, reenact old stories that limit our ability to live and love ourselves with an open heart. — Sharon Salzberg

To imagine the way we think is the singular causative agent of all we go through is to practice cruelty toward ourselves. — Sharon Salzberg

The overarching practice of letting go is also one of gaining resilience and insight. — Sharon Salzberg

The more we identify and acknowledge moments when we're unable to share in someone else's pleasure and ask ourselves whether another person's happiness truly jeopardizes our own, the more we pave the way for experiencing sympathetic joy — Sharon Salzberg

The fulfillment we have in owning, in desiring, is temporary and illusory, because there is nothing at all we can have that we will not lose eventually. And so there is always fear. — Sharon Salzberg

As we work to reweave the strands of connection, we can be supported by the wisdom and lovingkindness of others. — Sharon Salzberg

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. — Sharon Salzberg

When we set an intention to explore our emotional hot spots, we create a pathway to real love. — Sharon Salzberg

When we contemplate the miracle of embodied life, we begin to partner with our bodies in a kinder way. — Sharon Salzberg

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. — Sharon Salzberg

Sometimes we think that to develop an open heart, to be truly loving and compassionate, means that we need to be passive, to allow others to abuse us, to smile and let anyone do what they want with us. Yet this is not what is meant by compassion. Quite the contrary. Compassion is not at all weak. It is the strength that arises out of seeing the true nature of suffering in the world. Compassion allows us to bear witness to that suffering, whether it is in ourselves or others, without fear; it allows us to name injustice without hesitation, and to act strongly, with all the skill at our disposal. To develop this mind state of compassion ... is to learn to live, as the Buddha put it, with sympathy for all living beings, without exception. — Sharon Salzberg

When we experience dissatisfaction at work, which everyone does we can use our disappointment as fuel to wake up. — Sharon Salzberg

The Buddha actually described at some length what he meant by being a good friend in the world. He talked about a good friend as someone who is constant in our times of happiness and also in our times of adversity or unhappiness. A friend will not forsake us when we are in trouble nor rejoice in our misfortune. The Buddha described a true friend as being a helper, someone who will protect us when we are unable to take care of ourselves, who will be a refuge to us when we are afraid. — Sharon Salzberg

Pain & suffering requires time, awareness, and an intentional practice of self-love to disentangle. — Sharon Salzberg

In Buddhism there is one word for mind & heart: chitta. Chitta refers not just to thoughts and emotions in the narrow sense of arising from the brain, but also to the whole range of consciousness, vast & unimpeded. — Sharon Salzberg

Although love is often depicted as starry-eyed and sweet, love for the self is made of tougher stuff. — Sharon Salzberg

No matter what we think we should do, I don't think you can coerce yourself into loving your neighbor - or your boss - when you can't stand him. But if you try to understand your feelings of dislike with mindfulness and compassion, being sure not to forget self-compassion, you create the possibility for change. — Sharon Salzberg

To sense which gifts to accept & which to leave behind is our path to discovering freedom. — Sharon Salzberg

Faith is not a commodity we either have or don't have-it is an inner quality that unfolds as we learn to trust our own deepest experience. — Sharon Salzberg

It is sometimes difficult to view compassion and loving kindness as the strengths they are. — Sharon Salzberg

Contemplating the goodness within ourselves is a classical meditation, done to bring light, joy, and rapture to the mind. In contemporary times this practice might be considered rather embarrassing, because so often the emphasis is on all the unfortunate things we have done, all the disturbing mistakes we have made. Yet this classical reflection is not a way of increasing conceit. It is rather a commitment to our own happiness, seeing our happiness as the basis for intimacy with all of life. It fills us with joy and love for ourselves and a great deal of self-respect. Significantly, when we do metta practice, we begin by directing metta toward ourselves. This is the essential foundation for being able to offer genuine love to others — Sharon Salzberg

The practice of loving-kindness is about cultivating love as a trans-formative strength, — Sharon Salzberg

What's really transformative is our willingness to keep going, our openness to possibility, our patience, our effort, our humor, our growing self-knowledge, and the strength that we gain as we keep going. — Sharon Salzberg

Spiritual practice, by uprooting our personal mythologies of isolation, uncovers the radiant, joyful heart within each of us and manifests this radiance to the world. We find, beneath the wounding concepts of separation, a connection both to ourselves and to all beings. We find a source of great happiness that is beyond concepts and beyond convention. Freeing ourselves from the illusion of separation allows us to live in a natural freedom rather than be driven by preconceptions about our own boundaries and limitations. — Sharon Salzberg

I call myself a meditation teacher rather than a spiritual teacher. — Sharon Salzberg

Not paying attention keeps us in an endless cycle of wanting. — Sharon Salzberg

To reteach a thing its loveliness is the nature of metta. Through lovingkindness, everyone & everything can flower again from within. — Sharon Salzberg

Loving kindness is a form of love that truly is an ability, and, as research scientists have show, it can be learned. It is the ability to take some risks with our awareness-to look at ourselves and others with kindness instead of reflexive criticism; to include in our concern those to whom we normally pay no attention; to care for ourselves unconditionally instead of thinking, "I will love myself as long as I never make a mistake." It is the ability to gather our attention and really listen to others, even those we've written off as not worth our time. It is the ability to see the humanity in people we don't know and the pain in people we find difficult. — Sharon Salzberg

The most common response I hear when I tell people I teach meditation is, "I'm so stressed out. I could use some of that!" A response I also sometimes hear, which amuses me a lot is, "My partner should really meet you!" — Sharon Salzberg

In more ways than any of us can name, love is wrapped up with the idea of expectation. — Sharon Salzberg

We often get caught up in our own reactions and forget the vulnerability of the person in front of us. — Sharon Salzberg

[Meditation] trains us to be with a painful experience in the moment, without adding imagined distress and difficulty. If we look closely at it, the pain is bound to change, and that's as true of a headache as it is of a heartache: the discomfort oscillates; there are beats of rest between moments of unpleasantness. When we discover firsthand that pain isn't static, that it's a living, changing system, it doesn't seem as solid or insurmountable as it did at first. — Sharon Salzberg

As we practice meditation we are bringing forth ease, presence, compassion, wisdom & trust. — Sharon Salzberg

Mindfulness isn't difficult, we just need to remember to do it. — Sharon Salzberg

Real Love may run on a lower voltage, but it's also more grounded & sustainable. — Sharon Salzberg

It is a state of peace to be able to accept things as they are. This is to be at home in our own lives. We see that this universe is much too big to hold on to, but it is the perfect size for letting go. Our hearts and minds become that big, and we can actually let go. This is the gift of equanimity. — Sharon Salzberg

Paying attention to the ethical implications of our choices has never been more pressing - or more complicated - than it is today. — Sharon Salzberg

The poet Rumi says: How long will we fill our pockets like children with dirt and stones? Let the world go. Holding it, we never know ourselves, never are airborne. — Sharon Salzberg

Everyone's mind wanders, without doubt, and we always have to start over. Everyone resists or dislikes the thought of or is too tired to meditate at times, and we have to be able to begin again. — Sharon Salzberg

Compassion allows us to use our own pain and the pain of others as a vehicle for connection. This is a delicate and profound path. We may be adverse to seeing our own suffering because it tends to ignite a blaze of self-blame and regret. And we may be adverse to seeing suffering in others because we find it unbearable or distasteful, or we find it threatening to our own happiness. All of these possible reactions to the suffering in the word make us want to turn away from life. — Sharon Salzberg

The costs of keeping secrets include our growing isolation due to fear of detection and the ways we shut down inside to avoid feeling the effects of our behavior. We can never afford to be truly seen and known - even by ourselves. — Sharon Salzberg

Whether we fear the existence of boundaries with others or crave more of them, there's no denying that individuation and separation are inevitable parts of loving relationships that become the site of tension. — Sharon Salzberg

Looking at people and communicating that they can be loved, and that they can love in return, is giving them a tremendous gift. It is also a gift to ourselves. We see that we are one with the fabric of life. This is the power of metta: to teach ourselves and our world this inherent loveliness. — Sharon Salzberg

We can have skills training in mindfulness so that we are using our attention to perceive something in the present moment. This perception is not so latent by fears or projections into the future, or old habits, and then I can actually stir loving-kindness or compassion in skills training too, which can be sort of provocative, I found. — Sharon Salzberg

Training attention through meditation opens our eyes. — Sharon Salzberg

One of the most powerful aspects of delusion, or ignorance, is the belief that what we do does not really matter. — Sharon Salzberg

A key barometer to help us weigh the rightness of our actions is self-respect. — Sharon Salzberg

Buddhism has a term for the happiness we feel at someone else's success or good fortune. Sympathetic joy, as it is known, invites us to celebrate for others. — Sharon Salzberg

Training our mind through meditation does not mean forcibly subjugating it or beating it into shape. — Sharon Salzberg

Some things hurt, you know, and there's pain. But we magnify the suffering of it often, I think, by our reactions. — Sharon Salzberg

With our close friends, family members, and lovers, we hope to create a special world, one in which we can expect to be treated fairly, with care, tenderness, and compassion. — Sharon Salzberg

One of the primary conditions for suffering is denial. Shutting our mind to pain, whether in ourselves or others, only ensures that it will continue. We must have the strength to face it without turning away. By opening to the pain we see around us with wisdom and compassion, we start to experience the intimate connection of our relationship with all beings. — Sharon Salzberg

Each decision we make, each action we take, is born out of an intention. — Sharon Salzberg

When we practice metta, we open continuously to the truth of our actual experience, changing our relationship to life. — Sharon Salzberg

If we are nothing, there is nothing at all to serve as a barrier to our boundless expression of love. Being nothing in this way, we are also, inevitably, everything. 'Everything' does not mean self-aggrandizement, but a decisive recognition of interconnection; we are not separate. Both the clear, open space of 'nothing' and the interconnected mess of 'everything' awakens us to our true nature. — Sharon Salzberg

Metta sees truly that our integrity is inviolate, no matter what our life situation may be. We do not need to fear anything. We are whole: our deepest happiness is intrinsic to the nature of our minds, and it is not damaged through uncertainty and change. — Sharon Salzberg

When we respond to our pain and suffering with love, understanding, and acceptance - for ourselves, as well as others - over time, we can let go of our anger, even when we've been hurt to the core. But that doesn't mean we ever forget. — Sharon Salzberg

Mindfulness helps us to set boundaries by revealing what makes us unhappy & what brings us peace. — Sharon Salzberg

Rapture is the gateway to nirvana. — Sharon Salzberg

It's difficult to admit to ourselves that we suffer. We feel humiliated, like we should have been able to control our pain. If someone else is suffering, we like to tuck them away, out of sight. It's a cruel, cruel conditioning. There is no controlling the unfolding of life. — Sharon Salzberg

We know that people who consistently meditate have a singular ability to cultivate positive emotions, retain emotional stability, and engage in mindful behavior, — Sharon Salzberg

A lack of real love for ourselves is one of the most constricting, painful conditions we can know. — Sharon Salzberg

We nurture our sense of connection with the larger whole, noticing that the whole is only as healthy as its smallest part. — Sharon Salzberg

Sanskrit has different words to describe love for a brother or sister, love for a teacher, love for a partner, love for one's friends, love of nature, and so on. English has only one word, which leads to never-ending confusion. — Sharon Salzberg

There's no commodity we can take with us. There is only our lives, whether we live them wisely or whether we live them in ignorance. And this is everything. — Sharon Salzberg

An ordinary favor we do for someone or any compassionate reaching out may seem to be going nowhere at first, but may be planting a seed we can't see right now. Sometimes we need to just do the best we can and then trust in an unfolding we can't design or ordain. — Sharon Salzberg

Things don't just happen in this world of arising and passing away. We don't live in some kind of crazy, accidental universe. Things happen according to certain laws, laws of nature. Laws such as the law of karma, which teaches us that as a certain seed gets planted, so will that fruit be. — Sharon Salzberg

Though it may sound paradoxical, identifying our thoughts, emotions, and habitual patterns of behavior is the key to freedom & transformation. — Sharon Salzberg

Instead, the Buddha replied, "I am going to send you back to the same forest, but I will provide you with the only protection you will need." This was the first teaching of metta meditation. The Buddha encouraged the monks not only to recite the metta phrases but to actually practice them. As these stories all seem to end so happily, so did this one - it is said that the monks went back and practiced metta, so that the tree spirits became quite moved by the beauty of the loving energy filling the forest, and resolved to care for and serve the monks in all ways. The inner meaning of the story is that a mind filled with fear can still be penetrated by the quality of lovingkindness. Moreover, a mind that is saturated by lovingkindness cannot be overcome by fear; even if fear should arise, it will not overpower such a mind. — Sharon Salzberg

Evolutionary biologists tell us we have a "negativity bias" that makes our brains remember negative events more strongly than positive ones. So when we're feeling lost or discouraged, it can be very hard to conjure up memories and feelings of happiness and ease. — Sharon Salzberg

look at the world with quiet eyes. — Sharon Salzberg