Sharon Salzberg Quotes

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

~ Sharon Salzberg

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

~ Sharon Salzberg

Concepts such as loving kindness should never be used as weapons against our real feelings.

~ Sharon Salzberg

In one of the verses of Lal Ded, or Lalla, a fourteenth-century mystic from Kashmir, Lalla says: “At the end of a crazy-moon night the love of God rose. I said “It’s me, Lalla.”“It’s me, Lalla,” becomes “It’s me…whoever you are,” proclaiming that we no longer stand on the sidelines but are leaping directly into the center of our lives, our truth, our full potential. No one can take that leap for us; and no one has to. This is our journey of faith.

~ Sharon Salzberg

The combination of realizing our distinctiveness along with our unity is seeing interdependence.

~ Sharon Salzberg

Respecting differences while gaining insight into our essential connected-ness, we can free ourselves from the impulse to rigidly categorize the world in terms of narrow boundaries and labels.

~ Sharon Salzberg

Our ability to connect with others is innate, wired into our nervous systems, and we need connection as much as we need physical nourishment.

~ Sharon Salzberg

To reteach a thing its loveliness is the nature of metta. Through lovingkindness, everyone & everything can flower again from within.

~ Sharon Salzberg

Seeking is endless. It never comes to a state of rest, it never ceases.

~ Sharon Salzberg

If we turn away from our own pain, we may find ourselves projecting this aversion onto others, seeing them as somehow inadequate for being in a troubled situation.

~ Sharon Salzberg

The overarching practice of letting go is also one of gaining resilience and insight.

~ Sharon Salzberg

Mindfulness helps us see the addictive aspect of self-criticism— a repetitive cycle of flaying ourselves again and again, feeling the pain anew.

~ Sharon Salzberg

Rather than trying to control what can never be controlled, we can find a sense of security in being able to meet what is actually happening. This is allowing for the mystery of things: not judging but rather cultivating a balance of mind that can receive what is happening, whatever it is. This acceptance is the source of our safety and confidence.When we feel unhappiness or pain, it is not a sign that things have gone terribly wrong or that we have done something wrong by not being able to control the circumstances. Pain and pleasure are constantly coming and going, and yet we can be happy. When we allow for the mystery , sometimes we can discover that right in the heart of a very difficult time, right in the midst of a painful situation, there is freedom. In those moments when we realize how much we cannot control, we can learn to let go. As we begin to understand this, we move from a mode of struggling to control what comes into our lives into a mode of simply wishing to truly connect with what is. This is a radical shift in worldview.

~ Sharon Salzberg

Our vision becomes very narrow when we need things to be a certain way and cannot accept things the way they actually are.

~ Sharon Salzberg

In Buddhism there is one word for mind & heart: chitta. Chitta refers not just to thoughts and emotions in the narrow sense of arising from the brain, but also to the whole range of consciousness, vast & unimpeded.

~ Sharon Salzberg

Fearful of wasting a second, we hoard time as if it were money.

~ Sharon Salzberg

In those moments when we realize how much we cannot control, we can learn to let go.

~ Sharon Salzberg

Real Love for ourselves by definition includes every aspect of our lives—the good, the bad, the difficult, the challenging past, the uncertain future, as well as all the shameful, upsetting experiences and encounters we’d just as soon forget.

~ Sharon Salzberg

Trying to impose our personal agenda on someone else’s experience is the shadow side of love, while real love recognizes that life unfolds at its own pace.

~ Sharon Salzberg

Many strong emotions are actually intricate tapestries woven of various strands.

~ Sharon Salzberg

Even as we live with the knowledge that each day might be our last, we don’t want to believe it.

~ Sharon Salzberg

It is a state of peace to be able to accept things as they are. This is to be at home in our own lives. We see that this universe is much too big to hold on to, but it is the perfect size for letting go. Our hearts and minds become that big, and we can actually let go. This is the gift of equanimity.

~ Sharon Salzberg

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

~ Sharon Salzberg

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

~ Sharon Salzberg

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.

~ Sharon Salzberg

Patience doesn't mean making a pact with the devil of denial, ignoring our emotions and aspirations. It means being wholeheartedly engaged in the process that's unfolding, rather than ripping open a budding flower or demanding a caterpillar hurry up and get that chrysalis stage over with.

~ Sharon Salzberg

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.

~ Sharon Salzberg

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.

~ Sharon Salzberg

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 didn't know what to do with all the fear and emotions within, and here was the Buddha saying this truth right out loud.

~ Sharon Salzberg

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

~ Sharon Salzberg

I think we spend so much of our lives trying to pretend that we know what's going to happen next. In fact we don't. To recognize that we don't know even what will happen this afternoon and yet having the courage to move forward - that's one meaning of faith.

~ Sharon Salzberg

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.

~ Sharon Salzberg

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. It's important not to blame yourself.

~ Sharon Salzberg

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.

~ Sharon Salzberg

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 don't think of faith in those terms at all.

~ Sharon Salzberg

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.

~ Sharon Salzberg

Protection, as we use the word in Buddhism, is actually wisdom, it's 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.

~ Sharon Salzberg

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

~ Sharon Salzberg