Mindfulness Love Quotes & Sayings

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

By accepting and learning to embrace the inevitable sorrows of life, we realize that we can experience a more enduring sense of happiness. — Sharon Salzberg

Mindfulness and compassion can give you the power, illumination, love, and wisdom to draw higher forms, thoughts, feelings, and situations into your life. — Amit Ray

When our focus is on seeking, perfecting, or clinging to romance, the charge is often generated by instability, rather than by an authentic connection with another person. — Sharon Salzberg

To be self-compassionate is not to be self-indulgent or self-centred. A major component of self-compassion is to be kind to yourself. Treat yourself with love, care, dignity and make your wellbeing a priority. With self-compassion, we still hold ourselves accountable professionally and personally, but there are no toxic emotions inflicted upon and towards ourselves. — Christopher Dines

The second element of true love is compassion. Compassion is the capacity to understand the suffering in oneself and in the other person. If you understand your own suffering, you can help him to understand his suffering. Understanding suffering brings compassion and relief. You can transform your own suffering and help transform the suffering of the other person with the practice of mindfulness and looking deeply. — Thich Nhat Hanh

We need to maintain an awareness of our awareness, of what we are paying attention to, in order to discriminate between higher and lower forms of love. — Paul O'Brien

In reality, love is fluid; it's a verb, not a noun. — Sharon Salzberg

When emotions turn and stay sour, when thoughts become cynical and judgmental, good and compassionate treatment is on the line. Helpers who become sour and cynical tend to begrudge their high need clients for their neediness. There is a risk that helpers become too well-practiced at taking a bleak view of those they have avowed to assist. There is a temptation to begin to blame clients for their failure to improve. If treatment ends pre-maturely, with either a client never returning to treatment or a helper 'firing' them out of frustration, there is a tendency for the client to take the fall. Of course what we are talking about here are signs of burnout. — Scott E. Spradlin

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

Sooner or later everything will turn to dust - except love — Rasheed Ogunlaru

The more we practice sympathetic joy, the more we come to realize that the happiness we share with others is inseparable from our own happiness. — Sharon Salzberg

In your present-moment awareness, awaken to your innocence, your trust, your love, your eternal being. — Deepak Chopra

Love is a living capacity within us that is always present, even when we don't sense it. — Sharon Salzberg

You're only as good as you're next thought of yourself. — Curtis Tyrone Jones

Wholehearted acceptance is a basic element of love, starting with love for ourselves, and a gateway to joy. Through the practices of loving kindness and self-compassion, we can learn to love our flawed and imperfect selves. And in those moments of vulnerability, we open our hearts to connect with each other, as well. We are not perfect, but we are enough. — Sharon Salzberg

Fairy tales and stories of fantasy bridge the gap and inspires the heart and mind wherever religious thought reaches its limits or meets a dead end. In other words, fairy tales are spiritual in nature, rising above set dogmas and traditions to provide a modern and universal spiritual nourishment for the human soul. — Alaric Hutchinson

Success is all about falling in love with one idea! — Kabira

As the flower blooms in spring, compassion grows in mindfulness. — Amit Ray

By perfecting the practices of zazen and mindfulness, by learning patience and love and by realizing the essential emptiness of all phenomena, you will discover nirvana. — Frederick Lenz

How you refill. Lying there. Something like happiness, just like water, pure and clear pouring in. So good you don't even welcome it, it runs through you in a bright stream, as if it has been there all along. — Peter Heller

When you prepare a meal with artful awareness, it's delicious and healthy. You have put your mindfulness, love, and care into the meal, then people will be eating your love. — Thich Nhat Hanh

When you focus and accept the current moment with love, faith, and joyfulness, you are practicing mindfulness. That is better than controlling the universe. — Debasish Mridha

Unconditional Love is the outer expression of Inner Peace. — Alaric Hutchinson

In a true you-and-I relationship, we are present mindfully, nonintrusively, the way we are present with things in nature.We do not tell a birch tree it should be more like an elm. We face it with no agenda, only an appreciation that becomes participation: 'I love looking at this birch' becomes 'I am this birch' and then 'I and this birch are opening to a mystery that transcends and holds us both. — David Richo

We resonate with one another's sorrows because we are interconnected. Being whole and simultaneously part of a larger whole, we can change the world simply by changing ourselves. If I become a center of love and kindness in this moment, then in a perhaps small but hardly insignificant way, the world now has a nucleus of love and kindness it lacked the moment before. This benefits me and it benefits others. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

The virtues of free enterprise can become distorted by greed & delusion. — Allan Lokos

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

The breath is the first tool for opening the space between the story you tell yourself about love. — 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

Metta is the ability to embrace all parts of ourselves, as well as all parts of the world. Practicing metta illuminates our inner integrity because it relieves us of the need to deny different aspects of ourselves. We can open to everything with the healing force of love. When we feel love, our mind is expansive and open enough to include the entirety of life in full awareness, both its pleasures and its pains, we feel neither betrayed by pain or overcome by it, and thus we can contact that which is undamaged within us regardless of the situation. Metta sees truly that our integrity is inviolate, no matter what our life situation may be. — Sharon Salzberg

Although much of the work we do in committed relationships we do with our partners, sometimes it's necessary to start with ourselves. — Sharon Salzberg

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. — Sharon Salzberg

Looking at beauty in the world, is the first step of purifying the mind. — Amit Ray

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. — Sharon Salzberg

The first definition of love is to be there. This is a practice. How can you love if you are not there? In order to love you have to be there, body and mind united. A true lover knows that the practice of mindfulness is the foundation of true love. — Thich Nhat Hanh

Causing harm is never just a one-way street. — Sharon Salzberg

It's easy to put the links between the increases in mental illness, depression, ADHD, and the like, with the speed of the modern world. People never get the chance to do nothing, or when they do, they lack the control to prevent their mind from racing off in a thousand different directions. So much so that their doing nothing becomes a thousand different things and the thousand different things becomes stress, anxiety, worry and fear. Left untreated these simple everyday things become well entrenched in our psyches and start to dominate our lives. We have a chronic addiction with doing and we love to use our busyness as a stamp of our hard work and hectic lives and we get stuck in this busy trap of always doing. — Evan Sutter

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

Nothing has value without self worth — Rasheed Ogunlaru

Keeping secrets is a consequential act for all involved. — Sharon Salzberg

O happiness! O happiness! Wilt thou perhaps sing, O my soul? Thou liest in the grass. But this is the secret, solemn hour, when no shepherd playeth his pipe.

Take care! Hot noontide sleepeth on the fields. Do not sing! Hush! The world is perfect.

Do not sing, thou prairie-bird, my soul! Do not even whisper! Lo - hush! The old noontide sleepeth, it moveth its mouth: doth it not just now drink a drop of happiness -

- An old brown drop of golden happiness, golden wine? Something whisketh over it, its happiness laugheth. Thus - laugheth a God. Hush!

"For happiness, how little sufficeth for happiness!" Thus spoke I once and thought myself wise. But it was a blasphemy: that have I now learned. Wise fools speak better.

The least thing precisely, the gentlest thing, the lightest thing, a lizard's rustling, a breath, a whisk, an eye-glance - little maketh up the best happiness. Hush! — Friedrich Nietzsche

If we harm someone else, we're inevitably also hurting ourselves. Some quality of sensitivity and awareness has to shut down for us to be able to objectify someone else, to deny them as a living, feeling being - someone who wants to be happy, just as we do. — Sharon Salzberg

The path to healthy body, and happy soul is based upon self-study, mindfulness, love and awareness.

Understanding our relationship to eating cultivates a lot of insights and help us start living our highest potential. — Natasa Nuit Pantovic

We're capable of much more than mediocrity, much more than merely getting by in this world. — Sharon Salzberg

Just by breathing deeply on your anger, you will calm it. You are being mindful of your anger, not suppressing it ... touching it with the energy of mindfulness. You are not denying it at all. When I speak about this to psychotherapists, I have some difficulty. When I say that anger makes us suffer, they take it to mean that anger is something negative to be removed. But I always say that anger is an organic thing, like love. Anger can become love. Our compost can become a rose. If we know how to take care of our compost ... Anger is the same. It can be negative when we do not know how to handle it, but if we know how to handle our anger, it can be very positive. We do not need to throw anything away, (50). — Thich Nhat Hanh

Cultivation of positive emotions, including self-love and self-respect, strengthens our inner resources and opens us to a broader range of thoughts and actions. — 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

Mindfulness won't ensure you'll win an argument with your sister. Mindfulness won't enable you to bypass your feelings of anger or hurt either. But it may help you see the conflict in a new way, one that allows you to break through old patterns. — Sharon Salzberg

Equanimity can be hard to talk about. — Sharon Salzberg

We live mindfully by harvesting evocative scenes to pay attention to including the mountains and oceans, flowers and trees, love and friendship, music and literature, art and poetry. — Kilroy J. Oldster

The mind which is created quick to love, is responsive to everything that is pleasing, soon as by pleasure it is awakened into activity. Your apprehensive faculty draws an impression from a real object, and unfolds it within you, so that it makes the mind turn thereto. And if, being turned, it inclines towards it, that inclination is love; that is nature, which through pleasure is bound anew within you. — Dante Alighieri

Our role as gardeners is to choose, plant and tend the best seeds within the garden of our consciousness. Learning to look deeply at our consciousness is our greatest gift and our greatest need, for there lie the seeds of suffering and of love, the very roots of our being, of who we are. Mindfulness ... is the guide and the practice by which we learn how to use the seeds of suffering to nourish the seeds of love. — Nhat Hanh

Ultimately, we forgive others in order to free ourselves. — Sharon Salzberg

....The important thing is not where we die but how we live. Being native to a place is a labor of love and a life's work. It means stitching your life to that of a place with a thread spun from mindfulness, attentiveness, husbandry, pilgrimage, and witness. Stories knit these components of practice together. Flung outward, they clothe our relationships; flung inward, they map the soul. Stories enable us to enter and dwell attentively in a place; they enable us to travel and return, then eventually to leave for good. We need stories to stay alive spiritually: without them we would all turn into hungry ghosts. Stories are the only things we can take with us out of this world. They are the wings that bear us up or the chains that drag us down. In the end, it is stories that enable us to die. — John Tallmadge

We must work for the good and commit ourselves to postures of global selflessness, even if we can't figure out all the details surrounding the foreign dictators, food shortages, and fair trade. We're called to lean in, to work as hard as we can toward the good, and then trust in God who says, 'The way I work surpasses the way you work, and the way I think is beyond the way you think.' We're called to be witnesses of how God is at play in the world. — Holly Sprink

Desire I think has less to do with possession than with participation, the will to involve oneself in the body of the world, in the principle of things expressing itself in splendid specificity, a handful of images: a lover's irreplaceable body, the roil and shimmer of the sea overshot with sunlight, a handful of cherries, the texture and weight of a word. The word that seems most apt is partake ... We can say we partake of something but we may just as accurately say we take part in something' we are implicated in another being, which is always the beginning of wisdom, isn't it- that involvement which enlarges us, which engages the heart, which takes out of the routine limitations of self? — Mark Doty

Compassion dissolves ignorance. — Alaric Hutchinson

Your self-worth and self-esteem cannot be changed by doing positive affirmations. If that were the case many people would be super confident and are not. It may appear to work for some, but only because they have already faced the hurts inside that have caused low self-worth and low self-esteem, and are ready to feel differently.

Acknowledging the pain and the suffering that take place inside you, and allowing the feelings, will take time, but this new way of handling these feelings will change the way you relate to you and to the outside world. — Kelly Martin

To truly love ourselves, we must challenge our beliefs that we need to be different or better. — Sharon Salzberg

There's no denying that it takes effort to set the intention to see our fundamental connected-ness with others. — Sharon Salzberg

Our minds tend to race ahead into the future or replay the past, but our bodies are always in the present moment. — Sharon Salzberg

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

When we truly allow ourselves to feel our own pain, over time it comes to seem less personal. We start to recognize that what we've perceived as our pain is, at a deeper level, the pain inherent in human existence. — 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

I believe that there is only one kind of love - real love - trying to come alive in us despite our limiting assumptions, the distortions of our culture, and the habits of fear, self-condemnation, and isolation that we tend to acquire just by living a life. — Sharon Salzberg

The mystery and art of living are as grand as the sweep of a lifetime and the lifetime of a species. And they are as close as beginning, quietly, to mine whatever grace and beauty, whatever healing and attentiveness, are possible in this moment and the next and the next one after that. — Krista Tippett

Meditation can be a refuge, but it is not a practice in which real life is ever excluded. The strength of mindfulness is that it enables us to hold difficult thoughts and feelings in a different way - with awareness, balance, and love — Sharon Salzberg

The journey to loving ourselves doesn't mean we like everything. — Sharon Salzberg

Learning to treat ourselves lovingly may at first feel like a dangerous experiment. — 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

The wholesome pursuit of excellence feels quite different from perfectionism. — Sharon Salzberg

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. — Sharon Salzberg

I have also come to understand that although some people are naturally happier than others, their happiness is still vulnerable and incomplete, and that achieving durable happiness as a way of being is a skill. It requires sustained effort in training the mind and developing a set of human qualities, such as inner peace, mindfulness, and altruistic love. — Matthieu Ricard

Clinging to our ideas of perfection isolates us from life and is a barrier. — Sharon Salzberg

Forgiveness is the way we break the grip that long-held resentments have on our hearts. — Sharon Salzberg

If you love too much, you lose yourself.
If you love too little, you never find yourself. — Janet Gallagher Nestor

When we identify the thoughts that keep us from seeing others as they truly are we prepare the ground for real love. — Sharon Salzberg

Never feel ashamed of your longing for happiness. — Sharon Salzberg

There is no conflict between loving others deeply and living mindfully. — Sharon Salzberg

There are an incalculable - even infinite - number of situations in which we can practice forgiveness.

Expecting it to be a singular action - motivated by the sheer imperative to move on and forget - can be more damaging than the original feelings of anger.

Accepting forgiveness as pluralistic and as an ongoing, individualized process opens us up to realize the role that our own needs play in conflict resolution. — Sharon Salzberg

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. — Sharon Salzberg

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

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. — Sharon Salzberg

When we direct a lot of hostile energy toward the inner critic, we enter into a losing battle. — Sharon Salzberg

Loving ourselves calls us to give up the illusion that we can control everything and focuses us on building our inner resource of resilience. — Sharon Salzberg

The secure attachment of Western psychology is actually akin to Buddhist non-attachment; avoid-ant attachment is the inverse of being mindful and present; and anxious attachment aligns with Buddhist notions of clinging and grasping. — Sharon Salzberg

There is no reason good enough for us to ever be out of alignment with Peace, and there is no reason good enough for us to ever be out of alignment with Love. — Alaric Hutchinson

The starting place for radical re-imagining of love is mindfulness. — Sharon Salzberg

The ultimate expression of meditation comes when we can feel all the pains of the world, experience them with mindfulness and equanimity so they dissolve into energy, and then recolor that energy and radiate it out as unconditional love, moment by moment, through every pore of our being. — Shinzen Young

The organic gardener does not think of throwing away the garbage. She knows that she needs the garbage. She is capable of transforming the garbage into compost, so that the compost can turn into lettuce, cucumber, radishes, and flowers again ... With the energy of mindfulness, you can look into the garbage and say: I am not afraid. I am capable of transforming the garbage back into love. — Nhat Hanh

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. — Sharon Salzberg

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

True wealth is contentment, and happiness is forgetting to worry how you are and how much you have. — Robert Thurman

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

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. — Sharon Salzberg

I'm helped by a gentle notion from Buddhist psychology, that there are "near enemies" to every great virtue - reactions that come from a place of care in us, and which feel right and good, but which subtly take us down an ineffectual path. Sorrow is a near enemy to compassion and to love. It is borne of sensitivity and feels like empathy. But it can paralyze and turn us back inside with a sense that we can't possibly make a difference. The wise Buddhist anthropologist and teacher Roshi Joan Halifax calls this a "pathological empathy" of our age. In the face of magnitudes of pain in the world that come to us in pictures immediate and raw, many of us care too much and see no evident place for our care to go. But compassion goes about finding the work that can be done. Love can't help but stay present — Krista Tippett

The most precious gift we can offer anyone is our attention. When mindfulness embraces those we love, they will bloom like flowers. — Thich Nhat Hanh

When we are depleted our giving is empty. Today I take a moment to recharge, fill up with love for my life and all of its character so that I may give from a place of overflowing. — Lisa Wimberger

Mindfulness is the agent of our freedom. Through mindfulness we arrive at faith we grow in wisdom & we attain equanimity. — Sharon Salzberg