“As we work to reweave the strands of connection, we can be supported by the wisdom and lovingkindness of others.”
— Sharon Salzberg
“Protection, as we use the word in Buddhism, is actually wisdom, it’s insight. Protection is seeing and knowing deeply that all things in our experience arise due to causes, due to conditions coming together in a certain way.”
— Sharon Salzberg
“As we hone the ability to let go of distraction, to begin again without rancor or judgment, we are deepening forgiveness and compassion for ourselves. And in life, we find we might make a mistake, and more easily begin again, or stray from our chosen course and begin again.”
— Sharon Salzberg
“Sometimes people don’t trust the force of kindness. They think love or compassion or kindness will make you weak and kind of stupid and people will take advantage of you you won’t stand up for other people.”
— Sharon Salzberg
“I think so many people tend to think of faith as blind adherence to a dogma or unquestioned surrender to an authority figure, and the result is losing self-respect and losing our own sense of what is true. And I don’t think of faith in those terms at all.”
— Sharon Salzberg
“Dedicating some time to meditation is a meaningful expression of caring for yourself that can help you move through the mire of feeling unworthy of recovery. As your mind grows quieter and more spacious, you can begin to see self-defeating thought patterns for what they are, and open up to other, more positive options.”
— Sharon Salzberg
“Some people have a mistaken idea that all thoughts disappear through meditation and we enter a state of blankness. There certainly are times of great tranquility when concentration is strong and we have few, if any, thoughts. But other times, we can be flooded with memories, plans or random thinking. It’s important not to blame yourself.”
— Sharon Salzberg
“I think we spend so much of our lives trying to pretend that we know what’s going to happen next. In fact we don’t. To recognize that we don’t know even what will happen this afternoon and yet having the courage to move forward – that’s one meaning of faith.”
— Sharon Salzberg
“We need the compassion and the courage to change the conditions that support our suffering. Those conditions are things like ignorance, bitterness, negligence, clinging, and holding on.”
— Sharon Salzberg
“If you go deeper and deeper into your own heart, you’ll be living in a world with less fear, isolation and loneliness.”
— Sharon Salzberg
“The first of the four noble truths of Buddhism, that there is suffering in life, was enormously important to me. No one had ever said it out loud. That had been my experience, of course, but no one had ever talked about it. I didn’t know what to do with all the fear and emotions within, and here was the Buddha saying this truth right out loud.”
— Sharon Salzberg
“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.”
— Sharon Salzberg
“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.”
— Sharon Salzberg
“Patience doesn’t mean making a pact with the devil of denial, ignoring our emotions and aspirations. It means being wholeheartedly engaged in the process that’s unfolding, rather than ripping open a budding flower or demanding a caterpillar hurry up and get that chrysalis stage over with.”
— 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
“I call myself a meditation teacher rather than a spiritual teacher.”
— Sharon Salzberg
“I’ve spent quite a bit of my life as a meditation teacher and writer commending the strengths of love and compassion.”
— 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
“Even as we live with the knowledge that each day might be our last, we don’t want to believe it.”
— Sharon Salzberg
“Many strong emotions are actually intricate tapestries woven of various strands.”
— 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
“Real Love for ourselves by definition includes every aspect of our lives—the good, the bad, the difficult, the challenging past, the uncertain future, as well as all the shameful, upsetting experiences and encounters we’d just as soon forget.”
— Sharon Salzberg
“Fearful of wasting a second, we hoard time as if it were money.”
— Sharon Salzberg
“In those moments when we realize how much we cannot control, we can learn to let go.”
— 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
“As a friend of mine told me about Real Happiness: you wrote this one in American.”
— Sharon Salzberg
“Rather than trying to control what can never be controlled, we can find a sense of security in being able to meet what is actually happening. This is allowing for the mystery of things: not judging but rather cultivating a balance of mind that can receive what is happening, whatever it is. This acceptance is the source of our safety and confidence.When we feel unhappiness or pain, it is not a sign that things have gone terribly wrong or that we have done something wrong by not being able to control the circumstances. Pain and pleasure are constantly coming and going, and yet we can be happy. When we allow for the mystery , sometimes we can discover that right in the heart of a very difficult time, right in the midst of a painful situation, there is freedom. In those moments when we realize how much we cannot control, we can learn to let go. As we begin to understand this, we move from a mode of struggling to control what comes into our lives into a mode of simply wishing to truly connect with what is. This is a radical shift in worldview.”
— Sharon Salzberg
“Our vision becomes very narrow when we need things to be a certain way and cannot accept things the way they actually are.”
— Sharon Salzberg
“The overarching practice of letting go is also one of gaining resilience and insight.”
— Sharon Salzberg
“Mindfulness helps us see the addictive aspect of self-criticism— a repetitive cycle of flaying ourselves again and again, feeling the pain anew.”
— Sharon Salzberg