Quotes by Sharon Salzberg

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

Sometimes kindness is stepping aside, letting go of our need to be right & just being happy for someone.

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

While happiness is an end in itself, it is also the state of mind we can have right now.

Mindfulness is the agent of our freedom. Through mindfulness we arrive at faith we grow in wisdom & we attain equanimity.

Thinking we are only supposed to have loving & compassionate feelings can be a terrible obstacle to spiritual practice.

Compassion grows in us when we know how the energy of love is available all around us.

We can discover the capacity of the mind to be aware, to love, to begin again

Integration arises from intimacy with our emotions and our bodies, as well as with our thoughts.

The notion of loving oneself has gotten an undeservedly bad rap, which goes something like this: self-love is narcissistic, selfish, self-indulgent, the supreme delusion of a runaway ego looking out for “number one.” In fact, just the opposite is true.

Pain & suffering requires time, awareness, and an intentional practice of self-love to disentangle.

Self-love is an unfolding process that gains strength over time, not a goal with a fixed end point.

We truly can reconfigure how we see ourselves and reclaim the love for ourselves that we’re innately capable of.

Although love is often depicted as starry-eyed and sweet, love for the self is made of tougher stuff.

When we believe a wounding story, our whole world is diminished.

Consider how the sky is unharmed by the clouds that pass through it, whether they are light and fluffy-looking or dark and formidable. A mountain is not moved by the winds blowing over it, whether gentle or fierce. The ocean is not destroyed by the waves moving on its surface, whether high or low. In just that way, no matter what we experience, some aspect of ourselves remains unharmed. This is the innate happiness of awareness.

Anger often makes us hurt ourselves more than any enemy.

If we look at the force of anger, we can, in fact, discover many positive aspects in it. Anger is not a passive, complacent state. It has incredible energy. Anger can impel us to let go of ways we may be inappropriately defined by the needs of others; it can teach us to say no. In this way it also serves our integrity, because anger can motivate us to turn from the demands of the outer world to the nascent voice of our inner world. It is a way to set boundaries and to challenge injustice at every level. Anger will not take things for granted or simply accept them mindlessly.Anger also has the ability to cut through surface appearances; it does not just stay on a superficial level. It is very critical; it is very demanding. Anger has the power to pierce through the obvious to things that are more hidden. This is why anger may be transmuted to wisdom. By nature, anger has characteristics in common with wisdom.Nevertheless, the unskillful aspects of anger are immense, and they far outweigh the positive aspects.

Hatred does not help us alleviate our pain even in the slightest.

Instead of catching ourselves after we first felt angry, we develop a visceral sensitivity to whats happening within us in the moment & through mindfulness, we can shape our reaction right away.