Quotes by Sharon Salzberg

Mindfulness allows us to shift the angle on our story and to remember that we have the capacity to learn and change in ways that are productive, not self-defeating.

We can use meditation as a way to experiment with new ways of relating to ourselves, even our uncomfortable thoughts.

if we really look at our actions with eyes of love, we see that our lives can be more straightforward, simpler, less sculpted by regret and fear, more in alignment with our deepest values.

Paying attention to the ethical implications of our choices has never been more pressing—or more complicated—than it is today.

Causing harm is never just a one-way street.

If we harm someone else, we’re inevitably also hurting ourselves. Some quality of sensitivity and awareness has to shut down for us to be able to objectify someone else, to deny them as a living, feeling being—someone who wants to be happy, just as we do.

When we do our best to treat others with kindness, it’s often a struggle to determine which actions best express our love and care for ourselves.

When we feel conflicted about a particular decision or action, our bodies often hold the answer—if we take the time to stop and tune in.

You can see your thoughts and emotions arise & create space for them even if they are uncomfortable.

The breath is the first tool for opening the space between the story you tell yourself about love.

I see real love as the most fundamental of our innate capacities, never destroyed no matter what we might have gone through or might yet go through.

I believe that there is only one kind of love—real love—trying to come alive in us despite our limiting assumptions, the distortions of our culture, and the habits of fear, self-condemnation, and isolation that we tend to acquire just by living a life.

Mindfulness practice helps create space between our actual experiences and the reflexive stories we tend to tell about them.

Loving kindness practice helps us move out of the terrain of our default narratives if they tend to be based on fear or disconnection. We become authors of brand-new stories about love.

Our senses are often the gateway to our stories.

If we define ourselves by each of the ever-changing feelings that cascade through us, how will we ever feel at home in our own bodies and minds?

Meditation can be a refuge, but it is not a practice in which real life is ever excluded. The strength of mindfulness is that it enables us to hold difficult thoughts and feelings in a different way—with awareness, balance, and love

Mindfulness is so much wiser and more robust than our inner critic.

Compassion is born out of lovingkindness.It is born of knowing our oneness, not just thinking about it or wishing it were so. It is born out of the wisdom of seeing things exactly as they are.

The manifestation of the free mind is said to be lovingkindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity.