Quotes by Sharon Salzberg

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

Ive spent quite a bit of my life as a meditation teacher and writer commending the strengths of love and compassion.

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.

Patience doesnt mean making a pact with the devil of denial, ignoring our emotions and aspirations. It means being wholeheartedly engaged in the process thats unfolding, rather than ripping open a budding flower or demanding a caterpillar hurry up and get that chrysalis stage over with.

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.

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.

The first of the four noble truths of Buddhism, that there is suffering in life, was enormously important to me. No one had ever said it out loud. That had been my experience, of course, but no one had ever talked about it. I didnt know what to do with all the fear and emotions within, and here was the Buddha saying this truth right out loud.

If you go deeper and deeper into your own heart, youll be living in a world with less fear, isolation and loneliness.

I think we spend so much of our lives trying to pretend that we know whats going to happen next. In fact we dont. To recognize that we dont know even what will happen this afternoon and yet having the courage to move forward - thats one meaning of faith.

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.

Some people have a mistaken idea that all thoughts disappear through meditation and we enter a state of blankness. There certainly are times of great tranquility when concentration is strong and we have few, if any, thoughts. But other times, we can be flooded with memories, plans or random thinking. Its important not to blame yourself.

Dedicating some time to meditation is a meaningful expression of caring for yourself that can help you move through the mire of feeling unworthy of recovery. As your mind grows quieter and more spacious, you can begin to see self-defeating thought patterns for what they are, and open up to other, more positive options.

I think so many people tend to think of faith as blind adherence to a dogma or unquestioned surrender to an authority figure, and the result is losing self-respect and losing our own sense of what is true. And I dont think of faith in those terms at all.

Sometimes people dont trust the force of kindness. They think love or compassion or kindness will make you weak and kind of stupid and people will take advantage of you you wont stand up for other people.

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.

Protection, as we use the word in Buddhism, is actually wisdom, its 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.

As we work to reweave the strands of connection, we can be supported by the wisdom and lovingkindness of others.

“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.”

“You can search throughout the entire universe for someone who is more deserving of your love and affection than you are yourself, and that person is not to be found anywhere. You, yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.”

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