Sharon Salzberg Quotes - Page 6

By prizing heartfulness above faultlessness, we may reap more from our effort because we're more likely to be changed by it.

To offer our hearts in faith means recognizing that our hearts are worth something, that we ourselves, in our deepest and truest nature, are of value.

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

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.

What you learn about pain in formal meditation can help you relate to it in your daily life.

To sense which gifts to accept which to leave behind is our path to discovering freedom.

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

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

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

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.

Love as a power can go anywhere. It isn't sentimental. It doesn't have to be pretty, yet it doesn't deny pain.

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

I have seen that there are a number of people who benefit from doing loving kindness meditation, either prior to or along with mindfulness meditation. It varies from person to person of course, but for many, their practice of mindfulness will bring along old habits of self-judgment and ruthless criticism, so it is not actually mindfulness.

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

In our usual mind state, we are continually activating the process that in Buddhist terminology is known as 'bhava,' which literally means 'becoming.' In this space of becoming, we are subtly leaning forward into the future, trying to have security based on feeling that we can hold on, we can try to keep things from changing.

I think what we (as a society) need from artists of all kinds is courage, a willingness to explore, and a really big sense of possibility.

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

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.

Our practice rather than being about killing the ego is about simply discovering our true nature.

I call myself a meditation teacher rather than a spiritual teacher.

Fearful of wasting a second, we hoard time as if it were money.

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!"

Resilience is based on compassion for ourselves as well as compassion for others

In a single moment we can understand we are not just facing a knee pain, or our discouragement and our wishing the sitting would end, but that right in the moment of seeing that knee pain, we're able to explore the teachings of the Buddha. What does it mean to have a painful experience? What does it mean to hate it, and to fear it?

Voting is like alchemy - taking an abstract value and breathing life into it.