Words matter. These are the best Sharon Salzberg Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
In our own lives and in our communities, we need to find a way to include others rather than exclude them. We need to find a way to allow our pain and suffering, individually and collectively.
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.
The meditation traditions I started and have continued practicing have all emphasized inclusivity: anyone can do this who is interested.
We need to redefine community and find a variety of ways of coming together and helping each other.
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.
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.
What you learn about pain in formal meditation can help you relate to it in your daily life.
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.
We can always begin again.
It is so powerful when we can leave behind our ordinary identities, no longer think of ourselves primarily as a conductor, or writer, or salesclerk, and go to a supportive environment to deeply immerse in meditation practice.
We can always begin again.
Doing nothing means unplugging from the compulsion to always keep ourselves busy, the habit of shielding ourselves from certain feelings, the tension of trying to manipulate our experience before we even fully acknowledge what that experience is.
I think the associations people have with kindness are often things like meekness and sweetness and maybe sickly sweetness; whereas I do think of kindness as a force, as a power.
I’ve always said that lovingkindness and compassion are inevitably woven throughout meditation practice even if the words are never used or implied, no matter what technique or method we are using.
We apply our effort to be mindful, to be aware in this very moment, right here and now, and we bring a very wholehearted effort to it. This brings concentration. It is this power of concentration that we use to cut through the world of surface appearances to get to a much deeper reality.
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.
If you go deeper and deeper into your own heart, you’ll be living in a world with less fear, isolation and loneliness.
As we work to reweave the strands of connection, we can be supported by the wisdom and lovingkindness of others.
Everyone loses touch with their aspiration, and we need the heart to return to what we really care about. All of this is based on developing greater lovingkindness and compassion.
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 meditation traditions I started and have continued practicing have all emphasized inclusivity: anyone can do this who is interested.
It is sometimes difficult to view compassion and loving kindness as the strengths they are.
We are taught that revenge is strong and compassion is weak. We are taught that power is more important than love.
It is sometimes difficult to view compassion and loving kindness as the strengths they are.
We all want to be happy. We need to expand the notion of what that means, to make it bigger and wiser.
In Buddhist teaching, ignorance is considered the fundamental cause of violence – ignorance… about the separation of self and other… about the consequences of our actions.
Love and compassion don’t at all have to make us weak, or lead us to losing discernment and vision. We just have to learn how to find them. And see, in truth, what they bring us.
Faith is not a commodity that you either have or don’t have enough of, or the right kind of. It’s an ongoing process. The opposite of faith is despair.
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.
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.
When you’re wide open, the world is a good place.
Compassion isn’t morose; it’s something replenishing and opening; that’s why it makes us happy.
While you are meditating, if your mind wanders, gently bring it back to the present moment.
We think of ourselves as our titles or our jobs or our position in a family. We depend on being praised by others. But something happens when that praise is undermined.
We apply our effort to be mindful, to be aware in this very moment, right here and now, and we bring a very wholehearted effort to it. This brings concentration. It is this power of concentration that we use to cut through the world of surface appearances to get to a much deeper reality.
At times when I am myself sitting at a retreat, and at the end I get into my car to drive away, I watch my hand move forward to turn on the radio. When I can be mindful, I notice the fact that I actually don’t want in that moment to listen to the news or hear some music.
We need to redefine community and find a variety of ways of coming together and helping each other.
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.
While you are meditating, if your mind wanders, gently bring it back to the present moment.
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.
Faith is not a commodity that you either have or don’t have enough of, or the right kind of. It’s an ongoing process. The opposite of faith is despair.
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.
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.
To remember non-attachment is to remember what freedom is all about. If we get attached, even to a beautiful state of being, we are caught, and ultimately we will suffer. We work to observe anything that comes our way, experience it while it is here, and be able to let go of it.
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.
Voting is the expression of our commitment to ourselves, one another, this country and this world.
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.
What is important is not getting intoxicated with a good feeling or getting intoxicated even with an insight. These take many forms in our practice. We go through times of great release, where there has been physical holding for what feels like forever, and something opens up and releases.
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.
We live in this world of great promise, where everything seems to offer an unchanging final happiness, if we can only get enough of it. It is very intoxicating.