Sharon Salzberg Quotes

The meditation traditions I started and have continued practicing have all emphasized inclusivity: anyone can do this who is interested.

Meeting people in a genuine way and feeling like there is a vital and meaningful connection going on makes me come alive.

We can travel a long way in life and do many things, but our deepest happiness is not born from accumulating new experiences. it is born from letting go of what is unnecessary, and knowing ourselves to be always at home.

My ideal registration system would be an opt-out one, where every single person is registered once they turn 18. In Australia, I’m told, everyone is registered to vote and you pay a fine if you don’t vote.

To cherish others is to cherish ourselves. To cherish ourselves is to cherish others. And in that same way, we relate to the truth. If we support it, if we embrace it, if we uphold it, we will be embraced by it, we will be supported and upheld by it.

Voting is the expression of our commitment to ourselves, one another, this country and this world.

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.

Distraction wastes our energy, concentration restores it.

Meditation is a cyclical process that defies analysis, but demands acceptance.

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

Seeking is endless. It never comes to a state of rest; it never ceases.

Often we can achieve an even better result when we stumble yet are willing to start over, when we don't give up after a mistake, when something doesn't come easily but we throw ourselves into trying, when we're not afraid to appear less than perfectly polished.

We spend our lives searching for something we think we don't have, something that will make us happy. But the key to our deepest happiness lies in changing our vision of where to seek it.

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.

You cannot fail at meditation.

From the Buddhist point of view, it is true that emptiness is a characteristic of all of life - if we look carefully at any experience we will find transparency, insubstantiality, with no solid, unchanging core to our experience. But that does not mean that nothing matters.

Rapture is the gateway to nirvana.

The critical element in meditation practice is beginning again. Everyone loses focus at times, everyone loses interest at times, and everyone gets distracted over and over again. What is essential, and also incredibly transforming, is realizing that we have the ability to begin again, without blaming or judging ourselves, without thinking we have failed, without losing heart, we can, and need to, constantly be beginning again.

Restore your attention or bring it to a new level by dramatically slowing down whatever you're doing.

There are many times when I have to remind myself that people who harm others are coming from a place of profound disconnection. It is not easy to recognize the pain such a person is in, especially because they may not be conscious of it themselves. They may present themselves to the world as just fine. If you believe human beings have a potential for deep connection, wisdom and love; the limitation in those peoples' lives becomes clearer.

You don't have to believe anything, adopt a dogma in order to learn how to meditate.

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.

As I go through all kinds of feelings and experiences in my journey through life -- delight, surprise, chagrin, dismay -- I hold this question as a guiding light: 'What do I really need right now to be happy?' What I come to over and over again is that only qualities as vast and deep as love, connection and kindness will really make me happy in any sort of enduring way.

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.

Someone who has experienced trauma also has gifts to offer all of us - in their depth, their knowledge of our universal vulnerability, and their experience of the power of compassion.

The key to cultivating confidence in ourselves is understanding our right to make the truth our own.

It is never too late to turn on the light. Your ability to break an unhealthy habit or turn off an old tape doesn't depend on how long it has been running; a shift in perspective doesn't depend on how long you've held on to the old view. When you flip the switch in that attic, it doesn't matter whether its been dark for ten minutes, ten years or ten decades. The light still illuminates the room and banishes the murkiness, letting you see the things you couldn't see before. Its never too late to take a moment to look.

It's interesting that people bring different things to oppressive and difficult situations, when they're reduced to the barest terms of survival. That's what provides tension in a lot of films.

As we look around, it's very clear that in this world people do outrageous things to one another all of the time. It's not that these qualities or actions make us bad people, but they bring tremendous suffering if we don't know how to work with them.

By practicing meditation we establish love, compassion, sympathetic joy & equanimity as our home.

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

In those moments when we realize how much we cannot control, we can learn to let go.

The first step on the journey of faith is to recognize that everything is moving onward to something else, inside us and outside... We see that a self-image we've been holding doesn't need to define us forever, the next step is not the last step, what life was is not what it is now, and certainly not what it might yet be.

The embodiment of kindness is often made difficult by our long ingrained patterns of fear & jealousy.

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.

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

I am totally amazed at the spread of interest in meditation. When I first came back from studying in India in 1974, I would be asked in social situations what I did. When I replied, "I teach meditation" they would frequently look at me as though to say "That is weird," and sort of sidle away.

Compassion isn't morose; it's something replenishing and opening; that's why it makes us happy.

To relinquish the futile effort to control change is one of the strengthening forces of true detachment & thus true love.

People turn to meditation because they want to make good decisions, break bad habits & bounce back better from disappointments.

over time, offering loving kindness to all beings everywhere, including ourselves, unites us to one another so that we know that we can not go forward forgetting those left behind." Page 62

I've spent quite a bit of my life as a meditation teacher and writer commending the strengths of love and compassion.

Whatever life presents us, our response can be an expression of our compassion.

We need the courage to learn from our past and not live in it.

Develop a mind so filled with love that it resembles space.

We all want to be happy. We need to expand the notion of what that means, to make it bigger and wiser.

With attachment all that seems to exist is just me & that object I desire.

The difference between misery and happiness depends on what we do with our attention.