Sharon Salzberg Quotes

We cannot instantaneously force ourselves to forgive—and forgiveness happens at a different pace for everyone and is dependent on the particulars of any given situation.

~ Sharon Salzberg

Telling the story, acknowledging what has happened and how you feel, is often a necessary part of forgiveness.

~ Sharon Salzberg

Grief helps us to relinquish the illusion that the past could be different from what it was.

~ Sharon Salzberg

We can free ourselves from the old stories that have reduced us & allow real love for ourselves to blossom.

~ Sharon Salzberg

We often get caught up in our own reactions and forget the vulnerability of the person in front of us.

~ Sharon Salzberg

We don’t need any sort of religious orientation to lead a life that is ethical, compassionate & kind.

~ Sharon Salzberg

We find greater lightness & ease in our lives as we increasingly care for ourselves & other beings.

~ Sharon Salzberg

Once someone appears to us primarily as an object, kindness has no place to root.

~ Sharon Salzberg

The embodiment of kindness is often made difficult by our long ingrained patternsof fear & jealousy.

~ Sharon Salzberg

With mindfulness, loving kindness, and self-compassion, we can begin to let go of our expectations about how life and those we love should be.

~ Sharon Salzberg

Compassion has more to do with the attitude we bring to our encounters with other people than with any quantifiable metric of giving.

~ Sharon Salzberg

The first step toward feeling compassion for others is to set the intention to try it out.

~ Sharon Salzberg

Self-compassion is like a muscle. The more we practice flexing it, especially when life doesn’t go exactly according to plan (a frequent scenario for most of us), the stronger and more resilient our compassion muscle becomes.

~ Sharon Salzberg

Ask yourself, 'who is the one suffering from this anger? The person who has harmed me has gone on to live their life (or perhaps has died), while I am the one sitting here feeling the persecution, burning and constriction of anger. Out of compassion for myself, to ease my own heart, may I let go.

~ Sharon Salzberg

We have the power to improve our work lives immeasurably through awareness, compassion, patience & ingenuity.

~ Sharon Salzberg

Not everyone wants to take up meditation, but most people can feel an alignment with values like mutual respect, insightful investigation, listening to one another.Meditation is a way to help those values become real in day-to-day life, helping people to understand themselves more and more and have a way to not get lost in old patterns.

~ Sharon Salzberg

Meditation is not about what's happening, it is about how we're relating to what's happening.

~ Sharon Salzberg

Mindfulness helps us to set boundaries by revealing what makes us unhappy & what brings us peace.

~ Sharon Salzberg

Being happy at work is possible for all of us, anytime & anywhere, with open eyes and a caring heart

~ Sharon Salzberg

Distraction wastes our energy, concentration restores it.

~ Sharon Salzberg

When we experience dissatisfaction at work, which everyone does we can use our disappointment as fuel to wake up.

~ Sharon Salzberg

Forgiveness that is insincere, forced or premature can be more psychologically damaging than authentic bitterness & rage.

~ Sharon Salzberg

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

~ Sharon Salzberg

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

~ Sharon Salzberg

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

~ Sharon Salzberg

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

~ Sharon Salzberg

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

~ Sharon Salzberg

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

~ Sharon Salzberg

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

~ Sharon Salzberg

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

~ Sharon Salzberg

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

~ Sharon Salzberg

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.

~ Sharon Salzberg

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

~ Sharon Salzberg

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

~ Sharon Salzberg

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

~ Sharon Salzberg

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

~ Sharon Salzberg

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

~ Sharon Salzberg

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.

~ Sharon Salzberg

Anger often makes us hurt ourselves more than any enemy.

~ Sharon Salzberg

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.

~ Sharon Salzberg