Quotes from Sharon Salzberg

Life is like an ever-shifting kaleidoscope - a slight change, and all patterns alter.

While you are meditating, if your mind wanders, gently bring it back to the present moment.

We can't give the truth to someone as an object, we can only point to it, inviting inspection. It is in that spirit that we can hear or read a teaching and then look at our own lives, at our own experiences to see whether anything might have been revealed about them.

I think the associations people have with kindness are often things like meekness and sweetness and maybe sickly sweetness; whereas I do think of kindness as a force, as a power.

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.

To remember non-attachment is to remember what freedom is all about. If we get attached, even to a beautiful state of being, we are caught, and ultimately we will suffer. We work to observe anything that comes our way, experience it while it is here, and be able to let go of it.

It's a rare and precious thing to be close to suffering because our society - in many ways - tells us that suffering is wrong. If it's our own suffering, we try to hide it or isolate ourselves. If others are suffering, we're taught to put them away somewhere so we don't have to see it.

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

The Buddha said that no true spiritual life is possible without a generous heart. . . . Generosity allies itself with an inner feeling of abundance - the feeling that we have enough to share.

Meditation clarifies our minds and opens our hearts, and brings us to unusual depth and stability of happiness, whatever life brings.

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.

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.

Even on the spiritual path, we have things we'll tend to cover up or be in denial about.

We come to meditation to learn how not to act out the habitual tendencies we generally live by - those actions that create suffering for ourselves and others, and get us into so much trouble.

Doing nothing means unplugging from the compulsion to always keep ourselves busy, the habit of shielding ourselves from certain feelings, the tension of trying to manipulate our experience before we even fully acknowledge what that experience is.

It's interesting that people bring different things to oppressive and difficult situations, when they're reduced to the barest terms of survival. That's what provides tension in a lot of films.

Whatever life presents us, our response can be an expression of our compassion.

Voting is like alchemy - taking an abstract value and breathing life into it.

There's no commodity we can take with us. There is only our lives, whether we live them wisely or whether we live them in ignorance. And this is everything.

In a single moment we can understand we are not just facing a knee pain, or our discouragement and our wishing the sitting would end, but that right in the moment of seeing that knee pain, we're able to explore the teachings of the Buddha. What does it mean to have a painful experience? What does it mean to hate it, and to fear it?

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.

Let the breath lead the way.

We are all too often told by someone that we are too old, too young, too different, too much the same, and those comments can be devastating.

Because the development of inner calm & energy happens completely within & isn't dependent on another person or a particular situation, we begin to feel a resourcefulness and independence that is quite beautiful—and a huge relief.