Quotes from Sharon Salzberg

Letting go is actually a healthy foundation upon which we can open up to real love—to giving, receiving, and experiencing it authentically and organically.

Evolutionary biologists tell us we have a "negativity bias" that makes our brains remember negative events more strongly than positive ones. So when we're feeling lost or discouraged, it can be very hard to conjure up memories and feelings of happiness and ease.

Identifying the source of our personal narratives helps us to release its negative aspects and re-frame it in ways that promote wholeness.

When we constantly hear that we should be smarter, better connected, more productive, wealthier—it takes real courage to claim the time and space to follow the currents of our talents, our aspirations, and our hearts, which may lead in a very different direction.

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

We learn from conflicts only when we are willing to do so.

As human beings, we're capable of greatness of spirit, an ability to go beyond the circumstances we find ourselves in, to experience a vast sense of connection to all of life.

The simple act of being completely attentive & present to another person is an act of love, and it fosters unshakeable well-being.

It's all too easy to slot someone into the category of "needing help" and not to recognize the tremendous help they are offering to others.

When we experience inner impoverishment, love for another too easily becomes hunger: for reassurance, for acclaim, for affirmation of our worth.

real love seeks to find authentic life, to uncurl and blossom.

A relationship is the union of two psychological systems.

I had wanted my pain to disappear. I didn't want to feel the constriction of fear in my throat, the sadness of a child all alone in the world. But the transformation I was seeking wasn't to be found in what happened to the pain; it would be found in what happened within me in relationship to it.

And yes, water freezes. But it also melts.

The idea that traumatic residues—or unresolved stories—can be inherited is groundbreaking.

Mindfulness may help you gain insight into your role in conflicts with others, it won't single-highhandedly help you resolve them.

Michelangelo was once asked how he would carve an elephant. He replied, "I would take a large piece of stone and take away everything that was not the elephant.

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

Moreover, a mind that is saturated by lovingkindness cannot be overcome by fear; even if fear should arise, it will not overpower such a mind.

Meditation] trains us to be with a painful experience in the moment, without adding imagined distress and difficulty. If we look closely at it, the pain is bound to change, and that's as true of a headache as it is of a heartache: the discomfort oscillates; there are beats of rest between moments of unpleasantness. When we discover firsthand that pain isn't static, that it's a living, changing system, it doesn't seem as solid or insurmountable as it did at first.

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

With our close friends, family members, and lovers, we hope to create a special world, one in which we can expect to be treated fairly, with care, tenderness, and compassion.

Buddhism has a term for the happiness we feel at someone else's success or good fortune. Sympathetic joy, as it is known, invites us to celebrate for others.

It takes a special courage to challenge the rigid confines of our accustomed story. It's not easy to radically alter our views about where happiness comes from but it's eminently possible.