Sharon Salzberg Quotes about Meditation

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

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

Meditation isn’t about what’s happening; it’s about how you relate to what’s happening.

You might have extensive bouts of thinking exceedingly nasty thoughts, but because you are relating to those thoughts with mindfulness and compassion, that's considered good meditation.

Meditation clarifies our minds and opens our hearts, and brings us to unusual depth and stability of happiness, whatever life brings.

Meditation teaches us to focus and to pay clear attention to our experiences and responses as they arise, and to observe them without judging them.

Effort is the unconstrained willingness to persevere through difficulty.

Meditation is essentially training our attention so that we can be more aware— not only of our own inner workings but also of what’s happening around us in the here & now.

Each of us has a genuine capacity for love, forgiveness, wisdom and compassion. Meditation awakens these qualities so that we can discover for ourselves the unique happiness that is our birthright.

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

Meditation may be done in silence & stillness, by using voice & sound, or by engaging the body in movement. All forms emphasize the training of attention.

We are all too often told by someone that we are too old, too young, too different, too much the same, and those comments can be devastating.

You cannot fail at meditation.

With the practice of meditation we can develop this ability to more fully love ourselves and to more consistently love others.

Because the development of inner calm and energy happens completely within and isn't dependent on another person or a particular situation, we begin to feel a resourcefulness and independence that is quite beautiful - and a huge relief.

There are many different ways to practice meditation; it's good to experiment until you find one that seems to suit you.

Meditation is a tool for helping us accept the profound fact that everything changes all the time.

Mindfulness, also called wise attention, helps us see what we’re adding to our experiences, not only during meditation sessions but also elsewhere.

As we practice meditation, we get used to stillness and eventually are able to make friends with the quietness of our sensations.

Meditation trains the mind the way physical exercise strengthens the body.

Training our mind through meditation does not mean forcibly subjugating it or beating it into shape.

Meditation is not the construction of something foreign, it is not an effort to attain and then hold on to a particular experience. We may have a secret desire that through meditation we will accumulate a stockpile of magical experiences, or at least a mystical trophy or two, and then we will be able to proudly display them for others to see.

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.

Let the breath lead the way.

We long for permanence but everything in the known universe is transient. That's a fact but one we fight.